The Great War, 1871–1923 — the study guide

CHAPTER 1 · 1871–1907 · AUG 1907

Bismarck’s Europe and the Two Blocs

Bismarck wanted Germany to belong to the larger group in a Europe of five great powers. France had lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in 1871; if it found a strong partner, it might try to recover them by force. Germany therefore needed good relations with both Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg empire ruled from Vienna, and Russia. In 1873 the three emperors formed a league to consult and preserve peace. Their interests were hardest to reconcile in the Balkans, where both Austria-Hungary and Russia sought influence as the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, retreated. Russia’s victory over the Ottomans in 1878 seemed likely to give it a large client Bulgaria. The powers reduced Bulgaria at the Congress of Berlin, and Russia blamed Germany. Bismarck then made a choice that complicated his own task: the secret Dual Alliance of 1879 promised Austrian defense against Russia. Italy joined in 1882, creating the Triple Alliance.

Germany still needed a relationship with Russia. The Three Emperors’ Alliance was revived in 1881, but a Bulgarian crisis destroyed it in 1887. Bismarck replaced it with the secret Reinsurance Treaty: Germany and Russia would remain neutral if the other went to war, except if Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck in March 1890, and his advisers let this treaty lapse, judging it too devious. Russia was already borrowing in Paris and now sought security there too. A French squadron visited Kronstadt in 1891; a military convention, ratified in 1894, bound each partner to attack Germany if Germany attacked the other. France and the Russian Empire turn blue together on the map. The combination Bismarck had spent twenty years preventing had formed within four years of his dismissal.

Britain’s route toward France and Russia began with disputes beyond Europe, and with a German fleet close to home. British politicians called their avoidance of continental alliances ‘splendid isolation.’ After 1897 Wilhelm’s Weltpolitik, or ‘world policy,’ sought colonies, prestige, and sea power. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz’s Navy Laws of 1898 and 1900 committed Germany to a battle fleet in the North Sea. Britain depended on sea routes for defense and imported food, so the fleet threatened its security. The Entente Cordiale of 1904 settled colonial disputes: Britain gained recognition in Egypt and France in Morocco, without either promising to fight for the other. Wilhelm tried to break the understanding by landing at Tangier in 1905. At Algeciras in 1906, the powers instead sided with France. Britain and Russia divided Persia, today’s Iran, into spheres in 1907, completing the Triple Entente. Separate settlements and German pressure had brought Germany’s feared rivals closer together.

WHY IT HAPPENED

A new giant in the middle of Europe. The new Germany changed the scale of the European problem. Its population grew from about 41 million in 1871 to about 65 million by 1910, while France’s remained near 39 million. By 1913 it produced more than twice as much steel as Britain. The largest population west of Russia and Europe’s fastest-growing industry did not determine a particular alliance; they did require other powers to decide how to live beside a formidable neighbor. Bismarck’s system was one answer.

Alsace-Lorraine and the French grievance. Germany’s victory brought unity at the price of a lasting French grievance. Under the Treaty of Frankfurt, France surrendered Alsace and most of Lorraine, with about 1.5 million inhabitants, and owed five billion francs in indemnity. It paid within three years, but could not recover the provinces. Their loss remained a wound in French politics, and Bismarck devoted twenty years to containing the hostility the victory had helped create.

The Eastern Question. The Ottoman Empire had governed the Balkans for centuries. As it retreated, diplomats asked who would inherit its lands: this was the Eastern Question. Russia saw itself as protector of Orthodox Slavs and wanted free passage for its warships through the Straits. Austria-Hungary feared that strong Slav states on its border would unsettle Slavs within its own empire. Both were German partners, so each Balkan crisis threatened to set Bismarck’s allies against one another.

The Kaiser’s new course. Wilhelm II became emperor in 1888 at twenty-nine and intended to rule in person. He forced Bismarck to resign in March 1890. His new chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, and foreign office adviser Friedrich von Holstein wanted simpler, more transparent commitments; they saw the Reinsurance Treaty as incompatible with the Austrian alliance. Dropping it made Germany’s policy easier to state, while removing a secret link that had discouraged Russia from seeking France. Within two years Bismarck’s system had ended.

WHAT IT CHANGED

A war plan built on two fronts. The Franco-Russian alliance made a two-front war central to German planning. Alfred von Schlieffen’s answer, set out by 1905 and put into action in August 1914 (Chapter 4), was to defeat France first by sweeping through Belgium, then turn east before Russia’s slower mobilization was complete. The plan contemplated violating Belgian neutrality long before the crisis that brought war.

Britain bound by conversations. Britain had made no promise in the ententes to fight for France. But secret staff talks from 1906 and later naval arrangements gave both countries expectations about cooperation. When Britain went to war over Belgium in August 1914 (Chapter 3), its army already had plans to fight beside the French. The conversations had made intervention easier to imagine, even without a formal obligation.

A naval race that Germany lost. By 1912 the Royal Navy had concentrated its battleships in the North Sea, treating Germany as its most likely enemy. Tirpitz had wanted his fleet to win British respect; the result helped bring about the danger he hoped to deter. In the war (Chapter 8), the German High Seas Fleet was too small to win and too valuable to risk. It spent most of the war in harbor while Britain’s blockade strangled German trade.

Every crisis becomes a test of loyalty. A diplomatic setback could now be seen as a danger to an entire alliance. Germany failed to split the Entente at Tangier, and both sides drew the lesson that partners needed firmer support. Colonial and Balkan disputes became tests of loyalty. Chapter 2 follows three crises in six years and the lessons carried toward war.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Did Bismarck’s alliance system keep the peace, or did it build the trap that closed in 1914?

The peace under Bismarck was real: no great-power war broke out between 1871 and 1890, and Germany used alliances to restrain partners as well as protect itself. Yet the Dual Alliance tied Germany to Austrian fears in the Balkans, while the secret Reinsurance Treaty created commitments difficult to reconcile with it. Christopher Clark stresses the change after Bismarck: his successors let Russia go and alarmed Britain, helping form the later blocs. Historians following Fritz Fischer emphasize continuity in German ambition from the 1890s to 1914. Bismarck postponed the tensions created by unification without resolving them. His personal skill sustained the arrangement; institutions that can operate beyond their inventor offer a more durable basis for security.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The battleship that gave the dreadnought race its name never fought another battleship. HMS Dreadnought was being refitted when the British and German fleets met at Jutland in 1916. Its only combat success had come in March 1915, when it rammed and sank U-29 in the North Sea—the only confirmed sinking of a submarine by a battleship. U-29’s commander, Otto Weddigen, had already become famous for sinking three British cruisers in one morning in September 1914. Dreadnought became obsolete within a decade and was sold for scrap in 1921.

CHAPTER 2 · 1908–1913 · AUG 1913

The Balkan Crises

Austria-Hungary had administered Bosnia-Herzegovina since 1878, although the province remained formally Ottoman. In July 1908 the Young Turks, reforming officers, forced the Ottoman sultan to restore a constitution. Vienna feared that a revived Ottoman government might seek to reclaim Bosnia. Its foreign minister, Alois von Aehrenthal, met Russia’s Alexander Izvolsky at Buchlau castle in September. Izvolsky accepted annexation in return for Austrian support for opening the Straits between the Black Sea and Mediterranean to Russian warships. The bargain came apart when Vienna annexed Bosnia in October before Russia had secured passage through the Straits. In March 1909 Germany demanded that Russia recognize the annexation. Russia was unready for war and yielded. Bosnia turns from tan to charcoal on the map; in St Petersburg, an agreement made in private had ended in public humiliation.

A different dispute tested the partnership in western Europe. In 1911 French troops occupied Fez, Morocco’s capital. Germany sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir and demanded a large share of French Africa as compensation, hoping to weaken the British-French understanding. Britain feared a German Atlantic naval base. Its finance minister, David Lloyd George, publicly warned Berlin that Britain would not be pushed aside. Germany accepted part of the French Congo, while Morocco became a French protectorate: it retained its ruler, but France controlled defense and foreign affairs. The outcome also changed naval planning. The Royal Navy would guard the North Sea and the French fleet the Mediterranean, leaving each country dependent on the other. The attempt to split the Entente had helped give it practical force.

The next wars began with the Balkan states themselves. Italy’s seizure of Libya from the Ottomans in 1911–12 exposed Ottoman weakness. In October 1912 Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro—the Balkan League—attacked. Bulgaria advanced to within forty kilometers of Constantinople; Serbia won at Kumanovo and occupied much of Macedonia, a mixed region claimed by the Christian allies; Greece took Salonika. The great powers met in London and created an independent Albania, denying Serbia a route to the sea. The victors then disputed Macedonia. Bulgaria attacked its former allies in the Second Balkan War of 1913 and lost most of its gains. Serbia emerged nearly twice its former size. That October Vienna sent an ultimatum, a final demand with a deadline and threat of war, and Serbian troops left Albania within eight days. Austria-Hungary had seen a threat succeed, Serbia had gained by fighting, and Russia had reason to preserve its remaining Balkan client. Each would approach another confrontation with those experiences in mind.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The Ottoman retreat. The Ottoman Empire had lost Balkan territory since the Congress of Berlin. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 and Italy’s war against the empire in 1911–12 persuaded neighboring states that they might take what remained. Each retreat revived the Eastern Question: who would inherit Ottoman lands? Austria-Hungary and Russia had competing answers, and the final Balkan settlement brought them closer to collision (Chapter 1).

Serbia’s turn toward Russia. Under the Obrenović kings, Serbia had been tied to Vienna by a secret treaty of 1881. That relationship changed in 1903, when army officers murdered King Alexander and Queen Draga and installed a dynasty looking to Russia and the union of South Slavs. Vienna tried economic pressure in the ‘Pig War’ of 1906–09, a trade boycott named for Serbia’s principal export. Serbia instead found French loans and Russian protection. The effort to restore Austrian influence helped drive its neighbor further away.

A Habsburg empire afraid for its South Slavs. About seven million South Slavs lived under Habsburg rule, including Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, and Bosnian Muslims. Austrian leaders feared that a successful Serbia could attract them away, as Piedmont had drawn Italians from Habsburg rule during Italian unification in the 1860s. Annexation was intended to end Serbia’s claim to Bosnia. It also gave Serbian nationalists a grievance. Unification or Death, the secret society known as the Black Hand, was founded in 1911 and recruited young Bosnian Serbs.

Russia’s need to recover face. Defeat by Japan in 1905 and the revolution that followed left Russia too weak to fight over Bosnia in 1909. Germany’s demand for acceptance of annexation became a remembered humiliation in St Petersburg. From 1910 Russia rebuilt its army with French money and returned its attention to the Balkans, sponsoring the Balkan League as a barrier to Austria-Hungary. It sought to recover influence in the region where its retreat had exposed its weakness.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The July Crisis follows the script. Sarajevo, where the assassination of June 1914 occurred, was the capital of the province annexed in 1908. Young Bosnian Serbs armed through the Black Hand carried out the killing. Austria-Hungary turned again to the ultimatum that had worked against Serbia in October 1913, and Germany again promised support (Chapter 3). This time the confrontation escalated into general war.

Bulgaria’s revenge. The 1913 Treaty of Bucharest ended the Second Balkan War by taking most of Macedonia and southern Dobruja from Bulgaria. In October 1915 Bulgaria joined the Central Powers, Germany’s side, which offered it Macedonia. Its army helped crush Serbia within weeks (Chapter 6). The larger war offered a chance to pursue territory lost in the earlier one.

An arms race on land. Germany’s army laws of 1912 and 1913, France’s three-year service law, and Russia’s Great Programme produced some of Europe’s largest peacetime increases in army size. General staffs considered when the changing balance would favor them. German planners expected their advantage to disappear around 1916 or 1917. That expectation helps explain Berlin’s readiness to risk war while its leaders still believed victory possible, as armies moved in August 1914 (Chapter 4).

Nation-building by expulsion. New borders after the Balkan Wars displaced entire communities. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims fled toward Anatolia, the Turkish heartland in Asia; Bulgarians, Greeks, and Serbs were expelled from districts that changed hands. A Bulgarian–Ottoman agreement in 1913 arranged a voluntary exchange of villagers along the new border. The compulsory Greek–Turkish exchange of 1923 (Chapter 15) later gave the practice a place in international law.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Which of the three crises of 1908–1913 did most to make a general European war likely in 1914?

Bosnia best explains several attitudes visible in July 1914: Russia remembered its retreat, while Germany had shown that it would back Austria-Hungary. Agadir helps explain the western response, convincing British leaders that Germany sought European dominance and tightening naval links with France, making British neutrality less likely. The Balkan Wars have the strongest claim to have changed the immediate situation. They largely removed the Ottoman buffer, nearly doubled Serbia’s size, and strengthened Vienna’s conviction that only war could solve its South Slav problem. Christopher Clark is among the historians who give those wars particular weight. Bosnia shaped expectations; the Balkan Wars created the conditions in which leaders would apply them. All three crises nevertheless ended without a general war, and none made the decisions of 1914 inevitable.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Leon Trotsky reported the Balkan Wars while living in exile in Vienna. Writing as Antid Oto for the Kiev newspaper Kievskaya Mysl, he covered the fighting of 1912–13 and reported matters the belligerents’ own newspapers kept quiet. Five years later he led the Bolshevik delegation at Brest-Litovsk. Soon afterward, as commissar for war, he built the Red Army that marched on Warsaw in 1920. Journalists, soldiers, and politicians carried experience from the smaller wars into the much larger catastrophe that followed.

CHAPTER 3 · JUNE–AUGUST 1914 · JUL 1914

The Powder Keg

The Austrian heir's murder gave Vienna an opportunity to deal with a danger it had long feared. Austria-Hungary ruled many peoples, including South Slavs whose nationalism had encouragement from Serbia. Some Austrian leaders wanted to break Serbian power before it could further threaten the empire. Germany's unconditional promise of support, the “blank cheque,” made a hard policy more attractive: Vienna could act knowing that its great-power ally stood behind it.

The ultimatum sent to Serbia on 23 July was designed to be difficult to accept. Serbia nevertheless agreed to most of its demands. Vienna chose war anyway, declaring it on 28 July and shelling Belgrade. Russia had reason to resist the destruction of a fellow Slavic state: a Serbian defeat would weaken Russian influence in the Balkans. Its mobilization was intended to deter Austria-Hungary, but it also confronted Germany with the possibility of a Russian army assembling against its ally.

German leaders had already accepted a plan for war on two fronts. It called for a rapid attack on France through neutral Belgium, before Russia could bring its full strength to bear. Waiting while Russia mobilized seemed to put that plan at risk. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France on 3 August; its troops crossed the Belgian frontier on 4 August. Britain's cabinet had been divided, but the invasion of Belgium brought Britain into the war, citing its guarantee of Belgian neutrality.

The map now carried the consequences of decisions made far beyond the original dispute. Alliance commitments and military plans made the crisis dangerous, yet governments still decided how to respond. In this account, leaders in Vienna and Berlin bear the heaviest responsibility because they chose escalation. Russia's general mobilization and other decisions helped accelerate the final chain.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The alliance machine. Bismarck had used alliances to isolate crises. By 1914 the opposing alignments could spread one. An Austrian attack on Serbia threatened Russian interests; German support for Austria raised the prospect of war with Russia; and Germany's plan for that war included an attack on France. A network meant to deter an enemy could thus carry a local quarrel into several countries.

Timetables as destiny. Staffs expected the first army to concentrate to gain a decisive advantage. Germany's Schlieffen Plan aimed to defeat France in roughly six weeks, before Russia completed its slower mobilization. The railway schedules were hard to change, and fear of losing time pressed against negotiation. “Mobilization means war” captured the danger, though it did not remove political leaders' choices.

Austria-Hungary’s existential fear. The Dual Monarchy contained eleven nationalities under an aging emperor. On the map, much of its territory is not Austria or Hungary. Leaders in Vienna saw South Slav nationalism, encouraged from Belgrade, as a threat to the empire's survival. Some already wanted a local war to destroy Serbian power; the assassination supplied an occasion to act.

Germany’s closing window. Russia was expanding its railways with French financing, and German planners feared that their relative advantage would diminish after 1917. If war with Russia was expected, some concluded that it would be better fought sooner. Fischer emphasized German ambitions; other historians see reckless brinkmanship, accompanied by hope that Britain would stay out. Whatever the balance of motives, Berlin backed escalation in July.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The dominoes fall in one week. Austria-Hungary declared war on 28 July, and further declarations followed before Britain entered on 4 August. In the next chapter a German army group wheels through Belgium, roughly 1,500 km from Sarajevo. The route shows how far the consequences of the Balkan crisis traveled.

Britain comes in — over Belgium. The German crossing into Belgium resolved a division in Britain's cabinet. Interventionists could point to the 1839 guarantee of Belgian neutrality; Germany's phrase “the scrap of paper” entered the public argument. Britain brought the Royal Navy and the City's credit, as well as eventual resources from the empire shown on the world map, encompassing about a quarter of humanity.

The short-war illusion. Many soldiers expected to be “home before the leaves fall.” Crowds welcomed war, although the enthusiasm was less universal than the legend suggests. Governments anticipated a much shorter conflict than the fifty-one months that followed. Chapter 5 shows the fighting that overturned those expectations.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was the First World War an accident, a choice — or both? Who, if anyone, was to blame?

The “sleepwalkers” interpretation stresses the alliances, timetables and misread signals through which a crisis produced a war no one had intended on that scale. Fischer's school points to evidence of Vienna's desire for a Balkan war and Berlin's willingness to risk, perhaps seek, a continental one while its advantage lasted. The two levels belong together. The system made escalation easier; leaders in Vienna and Berlin chose it, while Russia's early general mobilization reduced the time available to others. Under different conditions, the nuclear age faced a related danger: deterrence arrangements can reward a state for moving first.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The car in which Franz Ferdinand was shot survives: a Gräf & Stift double phaeton, displayed beside his bloodstained tunic in Vienna's Museum of Military History. Its plate, A III 118, has invited the reading Armistice, 11-11-18, though the resemblance is coincidence. During the final days of the crisis, the Kaiser and the Tsar, cousins who signed their English telegrams “Willy” and “Nicky,” appealed to one another to restrain events as their governments moved toward war.

CHAPTER 4 · AUG–SEP 1914 · AUG 1914

The Guns of August

The German arrows through Belgium represent an attempt to solve the problem of France and Russia together. Germany intended to defeat France during the weeks in which Russia was expected to assemble its larger army, then transfer forces east. The route through neutral Belgium made a wide sweep possible, but Belgian forts resisted and German violence against civilians supplied the Allies with a powerful propaganda cause.

France had an offensive plan of its own. Its attacks in Lorraine rested in part on faith that fighting spirit could overcome firepower. They failed at appalling cost. On the other front Russia invaded East Prussia earlier than German planners expected, forcing Germany to attend to danger in the east while its main campaign was still under way in the west.

At Tannenberg, German forces used railway movements and Russian radio messages sent without proper coding to help surround and destroy Samsonov's army. The victory was considerable, but the fate of the German strategy depended on France. There the right wing had marched roughly 500 kilometres. Men were exhausted, horses were failing, and food and ammunition had to travel farther from the railheads. French forces were falling back toward their depots and could use intact railways to move reserves. Joffre replaced unsuccessful generals and shifted armies to the threatened flank.

The German armies moved east of Paris, about fifty kilometres away, and a gap opened between them. From 5 September French and British forces attacked into it at the Marne. The Germans withdrew to the Aisne and dug in; the dashed line appearing on the map marks the beginning of the new front. Germany remained a powerful opponent, but its intended sequence—defeat France first, then turn against Russia—had failed. It now faced the prolonged war on two fronts that the opening plan had been designed to avoid.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The two-front arithmetic. The Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 joined two powers whose combined strength exceeded Germany's. Schlieffen's proposed answer depended on their different mobilization speeds: defeat France during Russia's slower assembly, then turn east. The route through Belgium was chosen for speed, at the risk of British intervention. The western campaign had to be quick for the sequence to work; that necessity did not prove it could be made quick enough.

A plan diluted, or a plan impossible?. Moltke the Younger weakened the right wing compared with Schlieffen's earlier sketch and allowed the Lorraine armies to counterattack rather than draw the French west. Traditionalists blame these changes. Historians who stress logistics question whether the original sweep was feasible either: marching men and horses needed supplies beyond the railheads, and cavalry faced rifles. The exhaustion and shortages of the actual right wing at the Marne give that objection weight, while leaving room to examine command decisions.

Plan XVII and the cult of the offensive. France's Plan XVII also relied on attack. Its armies advanced into Lorraine under a doctrine that placed great faith in morale, but German firepower helped defeat the opening attacks within about ten days at terrible cost. Joffre subsequently used railways to move forces against the German flank. Both opening plans failed, and French forces were able to recover closer to their depots.

Russia moves early — for its ally. Russia entered East Prussia in roughly two weeks, much sooner than the six German planners had expected, and before its army was fully ready. Part of its purpose was to help France. The resulting loss of Samsonov's army at Tannenberg was a severe price. Two German corps sent east were absent from the Marne; that absence alone does not explain the outcome there, but it shows how an ally can force an opponent to divide resources.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The race to the sea — and the wall. After the Marne both sides tried to turn the other's northern flank, extending the fighting toward the sea. A fortified front came to run from the Swiss frontier toward the Channel. At First Ypres in Flanders, the old British regular army suffered grievous losses resisting a German offensive. Chapter 5 examines the trench system that followed.

Tannenberg makes a duumvirate. Hindenburg and Ludendorff emerged from Tannenberg as celebrated figures. By 1916 their authority had grown until they effectively directed the German war effort, pushing the Kaiser and chancellor into the background. Battlefield prestige had become political power.

Atrocity and the war of cultures. The killings at Louvain and Dinant supplied the Entente with evidence for its portrayal of a war against “the Hun.” Propaganda also exaggerated and embellished real crimes. Memories of those exaggerations later contributed to skepticism about atrocity reports in the next world war.

The shell famine. Armies consumed ammunition faster than prewar plans had allowed. Shell shortages helped drive governments to organize industrial production, bring scarce materials under control and employ women in munitions work. The crisis contributed to political upheaval in Britain and France. Industrial supply became central to sustaining and deciding the war.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

The Schlieffen Plan came within 50 km of Paris. Was it a near-run gamble, or never really possible?

The last 50 km were not simply another stretch like the first 400. German men and horses were exhausted, supply routes were long, and two corps had gone east; the defenders could draw on railways around Paris. Historians emphasizing logistics argue that the advance was reaching its limit. Operational historians also identify consequential decisions: the movement east of Paris, the gap between armies and the fighting in Lorraine. These explanations address different parts of the campaign. Command choices mattered within a plan that made enormous demands on men, animals and transport, and crossing Belgium had also risked British intervention.

AN INTERESTING FACT

About six hundred Paris taxis carried roughly five thousand men of the 7th Division toward the Marne. They were a small fraction of the armies engaged and probably did not decide the battle. The meters ran, and the French treasury later paid the cab companies 70,012 francs, reported as 27 per cent of the metered fare. The journey became a lasting symbol of a city placing its everyday resources at the battle's service.

CHAPTER 5 · THE SYSTEM, 1914–1918 · DEC 1914

The Trench

The dashed line on the map stretches roughly seven hundred kilometres from the North Sea to the Swiss border. After the campaigns of 1914, it stayed in much the same place for years. To cross the ground in front of it, infantry had to pass through wire under machine-gun and artillery fire. A defender who saw a sector threatened could bring reserves by railway; the attackers had to walk across ground torn up by shells.

A trench was also a way of keeping an army in place. Behind the forward line lay support and reserve positions, reached by communication trenches, with dug-outs for shelter and routes for supplies. Men rotated through the system. Boredom and disease were part of their experience, as were raids and sudden violence. At Christmas 1914, troops in some sectors stopped fighting together; elsewhere the war continued.

Why did a breach so often fail to produce an advance? The infantry needed orders, ammunition and guns to follow them. Yet the bombardment that helped them take the first position had damaged the roads, and shellfire cut telephone wires. As the attackers moved beyond their artillery support, defenders could bring reserves along railways to another line. The longer Eastern Front was held more thinly and moved much more; in the densely manned west there was little room to turn a flank.

Governments nevertheless wanted offensives to recover occupied territory and relieve allies. Gas, mines, creeping barrages, aircraft, tanks and new small-unit tactics offered ways to tackle parts of the problem, while defenders adapted to each. Sustained movement eventually required changes in organization as well as weapons. Armies had to make those changes while the political demands for attack continued.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Firepower and mobility. From 1870 to 1914, magazine rifles, machine guns and recoil-absorbing artillery greatly increased firepower. Movement and communication changed less: infantry walked, horses pulled guns, and orders passed by whistle, runner or vulnerable wire. A force could tear a hole without getting through it before the enemy closed it. By 1918 tanks, trucks and ground-attack aircraft contributed to greater mobility, although equipment alone was not enough.

Railways behind the front. Western defenders could shift reserves along lateral railways, sometimes moving a division overnight. The attacker's route was harder. Its bombardment damaged roads, captured railways might need conversion, and horses hauled ammunition over churned ground. As an advance extended, its guns and supplies had farther to travel just as reinforcements approached the defense.

Men and space. The west had millions of men along roughly 700 kilometres, leaving few open flanks. On the Eastern Front, a similar number occupied about twice the distance, and the line moved much more. The amount of force available for the space mattered. Maneuver returned in Palestine and Macedonia in 1918 where density and other conditions permitted it; trench deadlock was not universal.

Why attack continued. German forces held French and Belgian soil, and French governments wanted it back. Coalition partners also had to consider one another: pressure at Verdun helped prompt British attacks, and helping Russia was among the purposes of the Gallipoli campaign and its attempt to open the straits. These were real constraints on commanders' choices, though they did not excuse poor preparation or refusal to learn.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Attrition and resources. When armies could not readily break through, wearing down the enemy became central to their plans. Verdun and the Somme in 1916 made casualties and the ability to replace men and equipment important alongside the ground gained. The line on the map depended on population, production and supply.

Experiments in siege warfare. Poison gas (Chapter 6), mines and counter-mines, aerial photography, sound-ranging, creeping barrages and tanks were all tried against the defenses. Each opened possibilities, and each encountered countermeasures. By 1918 armies could sustain advances more effectively by combining methods and improving their organization.

The demands on civilians. Keeping armies in the field required labor and supplies far from the front. Britain introduced conscription in 1916; women entered war industries in large numbers; governments controlled food and policed dissent. Civilians had already suffered violence at Louvain. Chapter 8's blockade raises another question about war's reach beyond the battlefield.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

How far does “lions led by donkeys” explain the Western Front?

The phrase has force where commanders persisted with poor methods, concealed failure or accepted losses too readily. It cannot, by itself, explain a front where even capable commanders faced defensive fire, ruined ground and reserves arriving behind the line. Political and alliance obligations also pressed them to attack. Armies learned: compare the first day of the Somme with the British Expeditionary Force's combined-arms methods in 1918 (Chapter 12). We should judge a commander by the objective, preparation and response to evidence as well as the cost. Some adapted better than others, and learning itself carried a terrible price.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The Christmas truce of 1914 was a patchwork of local episodes, especially between British and German troops around Ypres; fighting continued elsewhere. Letters tell of carols answered across no-man's-land, joint burials and exchanges of buttons and tobacco. There were improvised football games too, but the celebrated organized match with a 3–2 score rests on thin, secondhand testimony. Commanders tried to prevent a repeat in 1915: orders threatened courts-martial, a Scots Guards captain faced one, and artillery shoots were scheduled for Christmas Day.

CHAPTER 6 · 1915 · NOV 1915

The Widening War

The deadlock in France encouraged both alliances to look elsewhere in 1915. New partners might add armies or expose an enemy to attack from another direction. Italy entered the Entente after being promised Austro-Hungarian lands, and began its long series of attacks along the Isonzo. On the Western Front itself, Germany released chlorine at Ypres, introducing large-scale poison-gas warfare.

The Dardanelles offered the Allies several possible gains at once. If they could force the straits, they could threaten Constantinople, supply Russia and perhaps bring the Ottoman Empire out of the war. The plan also promised to influence neutral Balkan states. But reaching those objectives meant landing and sustaining troops against defended ridges. Ottoman forces held the heights at Gallipoli; after months of fighting the Allies evacuated.

The Eastern Front offered more room for movement. Concentrated German and Austro-Hungarian artillery helped break a thin Russian line at Gorlice–Tarnów. The Great Retreat carried Russian armies out of Poland and Lithuania. Defeat, shortages and the movement of refugees strained the country behind the front. Nicholas II took personal command, linking later military setbacks more closely to his own rule.

Those developments affected the Balkans. With Gallipoli stalled and Russia retreating, Bulgaria saw an opportunity to regain Macedonia from Serbia. It joined the Central Powers in October and helped overrun Serbia. Serbian soldiers and civilians fled across the Albanian mountains in a disastrous winter retreat. Serbia's defeat opened a corridor from Berlin to Constantinople, making it easier to supply the Ottoman war effort.

The war also gave the Ottoman government cover for a campaign against its Armenian population. Armenians from Anatolia were deported toward the Syrian desert and subjected to mass killing and starvation. An estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million died. Their genocide is marked on the map in remembrance.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Seeking a route around the west. British advocates of an eastern strategy looked to the Dardanelles, Salonika and Mesopotamia. Opening the straits might let Russian grain out and shells in, threaten a Central Power ally and encourage Balkan states to join the Entente. Each prospect depended on reaching it: troops, ships, supplies and expeditionary skills had to be brought over long routes, often without priority. A promising destination on a map was not yet an achievable operation.

Italy changes sides. Although Italy belonged to the Triple Alliance, it remained neutral in 1914, arguing that the alliance was defensive. Both coalitions courted it in 1915. The Entente's secret Treaty of London on 26 April promised Trentino, Trieste and parts of Dalmatia, bringing an army of roughly 875,000 into the war. Italy received less than the wartime promises at the peace settlement. The grievance called “mutilated victory” later became part of Fascist politics.

Bulgaria chooses the Central Powers. Defeated in the Second Balkan War of 1913, Bulgaria wanted Macedonia back from Serbia. By 1915 the stalled Gallipoli campaign and Russia's retreat made the Central Powers appear stronger and able to offer Serbian land. Bulgaria joined them in October and attacked Serbia. The resulting Berlin–Constantinople railway corridor joins their territories on the map.

The eastern front gives way. The Eastern Front was roughly twice as long as the western line and held at lower troop density. Weaker Russian railways and shortages of rifles and other equipment made it harder to respond to a concentrated attack in 1915. Yet German chief of staff Falkenhayn doubted that eastern victories alone could decide the war: Russia's distances made a complete defeat difficult. The campaign nevertheless brought major gains and placed the Russian state under great strain.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Russia's army and government. The Russian army recovered sufficiently to mount major offensives in 1916. The strain at home remained: refugees crowded cities, inflation reduced purchasing power, and Nicholas's absence at headquarters left government in Petrograd associated with the Tsarina and Rasputin. Defeat had become part of a wider crisis of confidence.

A Central Powers corridor. Serbia's defeat connected Berlin, Vienna, Sofia and Constantinople by land and rail. Guns, funds and other supplies could reach the Ottoman Empire more readily. The Central Powers now formed a connected bloc from northern Europe toward Mesopotamia, while the Entente continued to apply pressure at sea.

Gallipoli remembered. Churchill left office and later served in the trenches. Subsequent planners studied Gallipoli's amphibious failures, including during preparations for the Second World War. In Australia and New Zealand, where the campaign holds an important place in national memory, 25 April remains Anzac Day. Mustafa Kemal's role helped establish the reputation of the future founder of modern Turkey.

Naming the Armenian genocide. The Ottoman government used wartime institutions against its Armenian citizens, including gendarmes, requisition powers and transport. In May 1915 the Entente described the violence as “crimes against humanity”; the issue received much less attention in the final peace settlement. A later statement attributed to Hitler asked who remembered the Armenians, although its wording and source are contested. The marker makes remembrance part of the map's account of the war.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Was Gallipoli a sound strategy badly executed, or an unattainable plan?

The plan promised much: a route for supplies to Russia, which was short of shells; a threat to the Ottoman Empire; and influence over neutral Balkan states. The question is whether the Allies could obtain those gains with the means they had. The naval attack alerted the defenders, while civilian-crewed minesweepers faced fire and mines remained a formidable obstacle. The land campaign met steep ridges and determined Ottoman troops, including forces commanded by Mustafa Kemal, able to move along interior lines. At Suvla in August, troops landed against little initial opposition but did not seize the heights quickly. Roughly 130,000 men died in the campaign. The aims were substantial, but the difficulty exceeded the preparation and capabilities assigned to them.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Fritz Haber helped organize Germany's chlorine attack at Ypres. His ammonia synthesis had another reach: it made nitrogen fertilizer available on a vast scale and helped Germany produce explosives when access to Chilean nitrates was restricted. Days after he returned from the front, his wife Clara Immerwahr shot herself with his service pistol. She was the first woman to earn a chemistry doctorate at Breslau. Whether her death was a protest against his gas work remains disputed; the surviving evidence is fragmentary. Haber received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for ammonia synthesis.

CHAPTER 7 · 1916 · NOV 1916

The Furnaces

Why did Germany choose Verdun? The fortress city had political and emotional importance for France, and Falkenhayn expected the French to fight for it. His later memorandum described an intention to drain French manpower, although historians dispute the document and its relation to his original plan. The French did defend Verdun, but German losses mounted too. Pétain kept supplies moving along the road to the city and rotated divisions through the battle, spreading its burden across much of the French army.

The Somme offensive served an ally in distress: it began partly to draw German strength away from Verdun. Its first day became a memorial to British mass loss. During the months that followed, the British army also learned to combine artillery and infantry in new ways. Farther east, Brusilov prepared attacks in several sectors, concealing the location of the main blow, and broke the Austro-Hungarian line. Romania, hoping to gain Transylvania, entered the war after his success. Central Powers armies then overran much of Romania and took its grain and oil.

These events make a distinction necessary. Attrition means wearing down an enemy's people and material faster than they can be replaced. Over the whole war, the Entente's greater combined resources gave it reason to expect an advantage. At Verdun, however, France and Germany suffered roughly similar casualties: a commander could not simply choose a battle and dictate the exchange. The Somme gained little ground, yet relieved Verdun, damaged German units and taught the British costly lessons about barrages, infantry tactics and tanks. Brusilov showed that surprise could break a trench line, but weak railways and poor cooperation restricted the use Russia could make of its success. That success had also encouraged Romania to enter at a moment when the apparent balance was about to change.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The bargain at Verdun. The attritional interpretation of Verdun depended on France losing men faster than Germany. That exchange was difficult to secure when German troops had to attack a fortress zone under its guns. Captured ground acquired a value of its own: by summer German prestige was tied to defending those gains, just as French prestige was tied to holding the city. The battle drew both armies into a costly defense of ground.

Allies and the timetable. At Chantilly in December 1915 the Allies planned simultaneous offensives in the east, west and south. Pressure on several fronts would make it harder for Germany to move reserves where they were needed. Verdun interrupted the plan by absorbing French troops. The Somme, on ground selected where the British and French armies met, became a predominantly British operation launched partly to help France. Its timing and location reflected the demands of fighting as a coalition.

Brusilov’s preparations. Brusilov spread his reserves across a wide front rather than massing them at one obvious point. Approach trenches reached within 75 meters of the Austrian lines, and aerial photographs helped prepare artillery fire. Surprise at many points struck an army already weakened by growing surrenders among some Slavic regiments. The advance outran its railways, German reinforcements strengthened the defense, and attacks near Kovel reverted to costly older methods. The preparations opened an opportunity that Russia's railways and neighboring commands could not sustain.

Romania chooses its moment. Romania sought Transylvania, indicated by the blue arrow, and secured Entente promises before entering after Brusilov's victory made Austria-Hungary appear close to collapse. Its position was difficult: it bordered three enemies, its army lacked supplies, and Russian help came late and grudgingly. Defeat delivered a vital oilfield and an estimated million tons of grain to the Central Powers. The intervention intended to help end the war strengthened Romania's enemies. Bulgaria's timing in Chapter 6 and its eventual reckoning in Chapter 12 offer another view of a smaller power's risks.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Losses and resources. The estimated losses are staggering: roughly 300,000 dead at Verdun, another 300,000 on the Somme, and perhaps a million Austro-Hungarian and Russian casualties in the east. Romania was overrun, while the western lines moved only kilometers. The resources left to continue the war also mattered. Germany ended 1916 outnumbered and blockaded, with the “turnip winter” beginning and a weakened ally to support. The Entente's greater resources would count over time, although its own armies had paid heavily for the pressure.

A weakened Habsburg ally. After Brusilov's offensive, Austria-Hungary depended increasingly on German divisions and command. Emperor Franz Joseph died in November 1916; within months his successor Karl secretly approached the French about peace. The empire that had helped start the war could no longer fight it alone. Its dependence forms part of the story of its rapid dissolution in 1918.

The survivors carry the war forward. Much of the French army had passed through Verdun. Many of those soldiers would face Nivelle's 1917 offensive and the mutinies that followed in part of the army. Veterans of the Somme carried costly experience into the BEF of 1918. The war also shaped later leaders: Charles de Gaulle was wounded and captured at Verdun, and Pétain commanded its defense. Their later decisions belonged to lives marked by the fighting of 1916.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Could attrition be a rational strategy in 1916?

The case for attrition begins with the difficulty of breaking the western front (Chapter 5). The Entente could maintain pressure with greater combined resources, including through blockade, and German manpower was under severe strain by 1918. But a sound expectation about the long war did not make any particular attack sound. Verdun showed that commanders could not dictate the exchange of casualties; prolonged losses also damaged Russian and part of French morale before Germany's defeat. An offensive must be judged by its methods, likely gains, losses and alternatives. Superior resources do not make the people committed to battle interchangeable.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Audiences saw The Battle of the Somme while the battle was still being fought. Official cameramen Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell supplied the footage, and the film opened on 21 August 1916. It reportedly sold around twenty million tickets in six weeks, bringing images of actual dead and wounded to an audience approaching half of Britain. Its most familiar sequence, men going “over the top,” was almost certainly staged at a trench-mortar school behind the lines: filming an actual assault head-on was exceptionally difficult.

CHAPTER 8 · 1914–1918 · THE WAR AT SEA · JAN 1917

The Slowest Weapon

The world map shows a front without a trench line. Britain controlled the exits from the North Sea and could restrict the overseas trade on which Germany depended. Food, fertilizer and raw materials became harder to obtain. The pressure accumulated gradually, but its effects were felt in severe civilian hunger. Estimates of the deaths attributable to the blockade remain disputed.

Germany's surface fleet met Britain's at Jutland in 1916. It inflicted heavier losses than it suffered, yet the British retained the routes needed to maintain the blockade. German leaders looked instead to submarines, hoping that unrestricted attacks on shipping would starve Britain before the United States could intervene effectively. Losses rose sharply in spring 1917. Then the Allies began gathering merchant ships into escorted convoys. Britain did not surrender, and the campaign helped bring America into the war.

Both campaigns sought to deprive an enemy economy of imports, but their methods differed. British surface ships could stop and divert neutral vessels. A submarine that surfaced to search a merchantman risked gunfire, ramming or a radio call for help; Germany chose to sink ships without warning. Deaths at sea could be sudden and visible, as in the loss of 1,198 people aboard the Lusitania. Hunger accumulated less visibly across a population.

German planners in 1917 predicted that sinking 600,000 tons a month would defeat Britain within five months. That forecast depended on more than the number of ships Germany could sink. Britain could change how it protected and supplied itself: it adopted convoy, rationed food and built ships. The United States entered on 6 April, bringing credit and industrial resources before its army arrived in force. The figures looked precise, but the outcome also depended on an opponent capable of responding.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The fleet and its diplomatic purpose. Admiral Tirpitz intended the “risk fleet” to make a war against Germany so dangerous that Britain would prefer neutrality and concessions, including colonies. Naval rivalry instead deepened British suspicion and helped bring Britain closer to France and Russia. Germany's fleet could challenge Britain but could not reliably defeat it, and its leaders hesitated to risk its loss. Long periods in port later formed part of the background to the sailors' mutiny in 1918 (Chapter 13). The fleet had influenced diplomacy even when it remained in harbor.

Two methods of economic pressure. Britain treated food as “contraband” and diverted neutral ships into its ports. The United States protested, although Britain settled claims for losses. German submarines faced danger in stopping vessels for inspection; unrestricted attacks instead sank ships without warning. Both campaigns sought to deny supplies to an enemy, but the deaths of 1,198 people aboard the Lusitania were immediate and conspicuous. Hunger was harder to see and its death toll harder to establish. This helps explain the difference in public reaction; it does not settle the legal or moral questions.

The five-month calculation. Holtzendorff's staff study estimated shipping sunk, neutral tonnage frightened away and the duration of British food reserves. Its conclusion was victory in five months, “before a single American soldier sets foot on the continent.” The decision went against the Chancellor's judgment. Yet the calculation depended on how merchants and governments would respond as well as on sinkings. Convoy, rationing and American shipbuilding could alter that response. Precise inputs could not guarantee the prediction.

The argument over convoy. The Admiralty's objections to convoy included practical questions: could merchant captains keep station, and would gathering ships congest ports? Escorts were wanted elsewhere, while a navy accustomed to seeking the enemy hesitated to guard freighters. Junior officers and a civilian ministry challenged the figures used against convoy, arguing that the reported “weekly 5,000 sailings” was inflated about twentyfold. Prime-ministerial pressure helped secure adoption. The decision put existing ships and escorts to work in a different arrangement.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The United States enters. The United States entered the war on 6 April 1917 after unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann telegram helped end its neutrality. The telegram, intercepted by British codebreakers, proposed a German alliance with Mexico against the United States. American loans, food, steel and shipping strengthened an Entente whose dollars and credit were under pressure. Soldiers followed the money and supplies: approximately two million Americans had reached Europe by late 1918.

Hunger after the armistice. The blockade continued after the November 1918 armistice, through the winter of 1918–19, and gave the Allies leverage in peace negotiations. Hunger and the imposed peace became connected grievances in German memory. Later Nazi plans for self-sufficiency and the conquest of grain-producing lands drew in part on fear of another blockade. The political consequences of the weapon outlasted the fighting.

The questions left by sea war. Prize law, submarine attacks and restrictions on food had all become urgent questions during the sea war. They returned in the next world war. Several major navies used unrestricted submarine warfare during 1939–45, although their policies and starting dates differed. The experience of 1914–18 had not settled the treatment of merchant crews or civilian supplies in a future war.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Can a moral distinction be drawn between the British blockade and Germany’s submarine campaign?

The difference in method matters. Britain generally stopped and diverted ships; unrestricted German attacks sank them without warning, immediately endangering passengers and crews. Britain's surface fleet made its method possible, while submarines faced different dangers when stopping a vessel. Both governments sought to weaken the enemy's war economy knowing civilians would suffer, and both faced disputes over maritime law. A photograph can show drowned passengers more readily than a statistic can show deaths from hunger, but visibility does not determine moral weight. A judgment must weigh the methods, military purposes, foreseeable suffering and alternatives in each campaign. The slow harm of economic pressure deserves attention alongside the sudden loss of a ship.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The marine painter Norman Wilkinson was associated with “Dazzle” camouflage, which by 1917 gave British merchant ships striking patterns. The aim was to confuse a submarine commander's judgment of course and speed, not to hide a ship against the horizon. A commander had little time at the periscope to calculate a torpedo's angle, and broken outlines were meant to make that calculation harder. More than two thousand British ships reportedly carried the patterns by the armistice. Admiralty evidence of effectiveness was inconclusive, though crews and insurers believed in them. Picasso, seeing camouflage in wartime Paris, is said to have claimed an artistic precedent: “It is we who created that.”

CHAPTER 9 · 1914–1918 · THE GLOBAL WAR · MAY 1917

The World’s War

A declaration in Europe could put people on several continents to work. Most colonies became legally at war when their ruling powers entered the conflict, without a separate decision by their inhabitants. Imperial governments could then draw on shipping, bases, money, food and raw materials as well as men. India furnished a vast volunteer army; African porters carried supplies for campaigns across difficult country; and Chinese laborers dug and repaired ground behind the Western Front. Many who sustained the fighting had never chosen the quarrel.

Control of communications and routes mattered from August 1914. Britain cut German undersea cables and hunted commerce raiders in the Pacific. Japan used its alliance with Britain to seize German possessions in China and the Pacific. In East Africa, Lettow-Vorbeck kept a small force moving for years. That mobility had a price: campaigns took labor and food from Africans, and coerced porters bore a heavy share of the cost.

The Ottoman lands presented Britain with a different problem. It wanted an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, cooperation with France, and later support for a Jewish national home in Palestine. It encouraged Arab expectations of independence, secretly arranged spheres with France, and supported the national home. Each commitment addressed a different audience. After Ottoman rule fell, those audiences could appeal to overlapping promises in arguments about who should govern.

Imperial service changed political expectations as well. People from India, Africa, China and the Dominions had seen European powers depend on them while denying many of them equal status. After 1918, Wilson’s language of self-determination and Lenin’s anti-imperialism supplied ways to express demands arising from that experience. Empire survived the war, but its claim to permanent, competent and reciprocal authority was weaker.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Empires at war. The belligerents controlled networks that already spanned the world: shipping lanes, coaling stations, colonial armies and undersea cables. Once their governments went to war, most colonies were legally at war too; their inhabitants made no independent decision. Britain could act across those networks immediately, cutting German cables and hunting commerce raiders in the Pacific.

Japan’s opportunity. Japan’s alliance with Britain dated from 1902, but entry into the war also offered Japan territory. After a siege of about six weeks it took Tsingtao, Germany’s Chinese port, and occupied the Marianas, Carolines and Marshalls. In 1915, while Europe was distracted, Japan presented China with the Twenty-One Demands, seeking extensive concessions and, in some demands, a position resembling a protectorate. Some islands taken in 1914 became American objectives in 1944.

Three overlapping commitments. Britain wanted Arab help against the Ottomans, French cooperation and support for Zionism. The McMahon–Hussein letters of 1915–16 encouraged Arab independence, though their territorial exclusions remain disputed. Sykes–Picot assigned British and French spheres in May 1916; the Balfour Declaration supported a Jewish national home in Palestine in November 1917. Each addressed a wartime need. Together they gave different parties grounds to claim a voice in the future of the same region, where people already lived.

Lettow-Vorbeck’s campaign and its cost. Lettow-Vorbeck’s small force could not defeat the British Empire, but it could keep enemy troops and resources occupied and potentially divert them from other fronts. Africans made that mobility possible and paid much of its price. Campaigns requisitioned crops and labor, villages were burned, and food supplies were devastated. Porter deaths are estimated in six figures, although precise counting is difficult. The economy of force praised in military accounts depended on costs imposed on others.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Imperial authority challenged. Imperial subjects had seen European armies suffer and rely on their labor and loyalty. Wilson’s “self-determination” and Lenin’s anti-imperialism gave political language to experiences that could already raise questions about imperial authority. In 1919 Egypt rose; the Amritsar massacre damaged claims of liberal British rule in India; and the Versailles decision on Shandong helped spur China’s May Fourth movement. Independence would take decades, but the war sharpened demands for it and weakened claims that empire was permanent or reciprocal.

Mandates and continued rule. The victors assigned former German and Ottoman territories as League of Nations “mandates,” administered as trusteeships with reporting obligations. Look at the world map at the end: the grey-tan grows. Outside rule continued where many had sought independence, and the distance between liberation rhetoric and the settlement fed nationalist opposition from Cairo to Hanoi. Ho Chi Minh, then a young kitchen worker, petitioned at Versailles and was not received.

Remembering imperial service. The Indian Army counted 74,000 dead; French African tirailleurs fought at Verdun; Chinese laborers cleared battlefields into 1920; and many African porters died without graves. For communities outside Europe, these were central experiences of the war. Imperial memory gave them a much smaller place for most of a century.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Is “A European civil war with global casualties” a fair description of 1914–18?

The description captures the European origins of the crisis and the importance of the decisive European fronts. It also points to the imperial power that drew people elsewhere into the fighting. But the map shows why their experiences cannot be understood simply as casualties of someone else’s quarrel. Japan’s expansion changed the balance of power in East Asia and the Pacific. In Ottoman lands, the Arab revolt, Armenian genocide and partition of Anatolia had stakes of their own. In India, Africa and Indochina, service made imperial rule felt in lives and labor; those who contributed could ask why they lacked equal political standing. Such questions energized later challenges to empire, even though independence did not follow immediately. The war began in Europe, but its conduct and consequences reached beyond Europe.

AN INTERESTING FACT

An account of payments to Lettow-Vorbeck’s former askari describes a curious test in 1964. The West German Bundestag funded unpaid wages, and a pay table was established at Mwanza on Lake Victoria. Many elderly claimants lacked papers, so, the story says, each was handed a broom and asked to perform the German manual of arms. None failed. African porters who died during the campaign were not included in such a payment.

CHAPTER 10 · 1917 · NOV 1917

Breaking Points

In Petrograd, the struggle to find food brought people into the streets. Strikes spread, and the garrison soldiers sent to suppress the crowds refused to fire. The Tsar abdicated. Russia now had a new government, but it still faced the war that had helped destroy the old one.

The Provisional Government chose to fight on. Alliance obligations, dependence on credit and territorial ambitions gave its leaders reasons to stay; they also hoped that a free Russia would fight better. Another failed offensive instead deepened distrust and desertion. The Bolsheviks offered peace, land and bread, and in November seized power. Russia began to leave the war.

France’s army also reached a breaking point. After the Nivelle Offensive, many soldiers would defend their positions but refused to attack again. That distinction mattered: Pétain could retain the line while improving leave, food and rest and adopting a less costly strategy. France still had an administration and a government capable of making those changes. Russia’s monarchy had collapsed, its transport was failing and its cities lacked food. There, soldiers could look to the soviets and parties offering peace, or go home to pursue land, while the government continued its offensive war.

The fighting revealed another problem: how could an army turn an opening in a fortified line into a lasting advance? At Caporetto, infiltration troops bypassed strongpoints and disrupted defenses behind them. The Italian front gave way, but the reorganized army withdrew to the Piave and held. At Cambrai, tanks crossed wire without a long warning bombardment; a German counterattack followed the initial gains. In both cases, guns and supplies could not yet move forward fast enough to make the breakthrough decisive.

Across the Atlantic, the United States had entered the war. American finance and shipping helped the Allies before large numbers of troops arrived. Those troops would change the timetable: the Entente could hope to become stronger as the war continued, while Germany had reason to seek a decision before they arrived in force.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Russia’s collapsing authority. By taking personal command of the army in 1915, the Tsar tied his authority to its fortunes. Military failures damaged him directly, while court politics, Rasputin and a German-born Tsarina encouraged rumors of treason. Inflation and failing railways made food harder to obtain. A regime demanding total-war sacrifices could not reliably supply its cities. When strikes spread and soldiers refused to suppress them, the monarchy lacked the authority to survive.

Why the government continued the war. The Provisional Government inherited commitments as well as a war. It depended on Entente credit, had treaties and alliance obligations, and hoped for territorial gains including Constantinople. Its leaders also believed a free Russia might fight better. These reasons explain the decision to continue, but they did not make an exhausted army accept another defeat. The Bolshevik promise of “Peace, land, bread” addressed needs the government had not satisfied, and fighting on made that alternative more compelling.

What French soldiers refused. Many French soldiers drew a line between defending their country and taking part in another offensive. They held trenches, asked for leave, rest and better tactics, and some sang the Internationale. Pétain could respond to these demands while keeping France in the war. In Russia, similar complaints arose amid a collapsed monarchy and a contest between the Provisional Government and the soviets. The state behind an army affected both what soldiers could ask for and whom they could trust to answer.

Two ways through the line. At Caporetto, infiltration troops followed the barrage, bypassed strongpoints and gave junior leaders initiative to move through the defenses. At Cambrai, tanks crushed wire and crossed trenches without the prolonged bombardment that would alert defenders. Both methods made openings. Both also exposed the difficulty of exploiting them: infantry and unreliable machines could outrun the guns and supplies needed to sustain an advance. The campaigns of 1918 would test how far armies could carry and defend such gains.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Germany’s opportunity. Russia’s exit released some fifty German divisions for transfer west. Germany thus gained a narrow opportunity to attack before American armies arrived in force. Chapter 11 follows its gains in the east; Chapter 12 follows its gamble in the west.

American resources. American entry gave the Allies credit, expanded shipping and the prospect of millions of troops. Loans eased their financial crisis, and shipbuilding helped replace losses to U-boats. Waiting could therefore strengthen the Allied position. Pétain’s “wait for the Americans and the tanks” expressed a strategy for holding out until that help arrived.

Rival visions of peace. The rival governments offered different answers to what peace should bring. Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918 called for open covenants and self-determination; Lenin’s Decree on Peace called for immediate peace and revolutionary change. These programs raised expectations among peoples affected by settlements from Brest-Litovsk to Versailles, who could measure the terms imposed on them against those promises.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Why did Russia’s army dissolve while France’s recovered, despite exhaustion in both?

Both armies had suffered failed attacks and heavy losses, and their soldiers wanted food and leave. In France, however, the republic, railway supplies and Allied support remained in place. Pétain could improve conditions and suspend great offensives while soldiers continued to defend. Russia’s autocracy had fallen, the capital faced shortages, and the Provisional Government had tied its authority to fighting on. Russian soldiers could look to soviets and a party promising peace and land, or leave to pursue land at home. France could hold until conditions improved. In Russia, another failed offensive intensified the dispute over who should govern and whether the war should continue. The soldiers’ grievances were similar; the institutions and alternatives available to them were not.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Among the Caporetto infiltrators was Erwin Rommel, a 25-year-old Württemberg mountain lieutenant. With a detachment of a few hundred men, he took Monte Matajur after roughly fifty hours of climbing and bluff; by his own count, he claimed 9,000 prisoners for a handful of casualties. Another officer initially received the Pour le Mérite, but Rommel pressed his claim and obtained it. His memoir Infantry Attacks (1937) became an influential account of tactics studied between the wars, including by soldiers who later fought with tanks.

CHAPTER 11 · WINTER 1917–18 · APR 1918

Brest-Litovsk: The Gamble in the East Pays

The Bolsheviks had taken power promising to end Russia’s war. Peace, however, came with German demands for territory that Trotsky was unwilling to concede. At Brest-Litovsk he offered “no war, no peace”: Russia would stop fighting, but would sign no treaty. This left the outcome in German hands. When Germany launched Operation Faustschlag, its troops advanced against almost no organized resistance. Lenin pressed a fiercely divided Bolshevik leadership to accept the terms, and the treaty was signed on 3 March 1918.

Lenin called it an obscene peace, yet he saw no dependable army with which to defend the territory. If the new government lost power in a continuing war, it could recover nothing; if it survived, the losses might one day be reversed. Russia surrendered Poland, Baltic lands, Ukraine and other territories containing large shares of the former empire’s population, farmland and industry.

For Germany, the settlement opened the prospect of an eastern empire and released divisions for France. German leaders planned to support client governments and requisition resources, but those arrangements had to be enforced. Resistance to occupation and the difficulty of obtaining grain kept troops in the east: roughly a million German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers remained there, even as about forty-eight divisions moved west.

The Allies drew their own lesson from the settlement. Its terms showed what a defeated state might face and made compromise with Germany harder to imagine. Ludendorff, meanwhile, had a temporary opportunity before growing American arrivals altered the western balance. The territory on the map was a substantial gain, but its resources would take time to secure; Germany had one spring to turn the divisions it could use into victory.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Lenin’s cold arithmetic. The Central Committee faced three proposals. Bukharin wanted revolutionary war; Trotsky sought neither war nor a signed peace; Lenin urged acceptance of the “obscene peace.” Lenin’s reason was that the revolution lacked an army capable of holding the territory. Ground surrendered now might be recovered, whereas a government destroyed by renewed fighting could recover nothing. The regime survived, and Soviet power returned to much of the lost territory within five years of Germany’s defeat, through further conflict.

Germany’s eastern ideology. The settlement gave substance to ambitions older than the negotiations. German war-aims programs since 1914 had envisaged a German-dominated Mitteleuropa and a border strip. Under Ludendorff’s military leadership, Baltic client kingdoms and an economically dependent Ukraine became part of the projected order. Some historians trace a continuity between these imperial plans and later German projects in the east: the ambition to dominate came before the ideology that made the later project genocidal.

The garrison paradox. The new eastern order required soldiers to guard railways, requisition grain and support client regimes from Finland to Georgia. Around a million German and Austro-Hungarian men remained in the east for such work and were unavailable for western battles, including the Marne in July. Conquest enlarged Germany’s apparent strength while imposing a substantial cost in troops. How many could have been withdrawn, and at what cost to the occupation, remains a further question.

WHAT IT CHANGED

The last race. About 48 divisions moved west, and Germany prepared the five-hour bombardment for Michael, scheduled for 21 March. Against that temporary reinforcement stood the growing flow of American troops. The outcome depended on what the German army could achieve before those arrivals changed the balance.

Russia’s agony continues. Russia’s exit from the world war was followed by civil war. Reds and Whites fought across the former empire, Allied forces intervened at ports, and the Czechoslovak Legion fought along the Trans-Siberian railway. Estimates for deaths from war, terror and famine through 1922 range from seven to twelve million, exceeding Russia’s losses in the world war.

The precedent everyone cites. Brest-Litovsk became part of the dispute over Versailles. When Germans protested against the 1919 terms, Allies could answer by recalling what Germany had imposed on a defeated Russia; Allied leaders also invoked security in framing their settlement. The earlier treaty supplied a precedent in the argument, although Versailles had causes of its own.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Why did the gains at Brest-Litovsk fail to save Germany?

The eastern victory released divisions for the west and promised food and other resources. But Germany had to hold its new position: roughly a million German and Austro-Hungarian troops remained east, while Ukrainian grain arrived in disappointing quantities. Romanian oil offered another potential resource, although Romania’s settlement was separate from Brest-Litovsk. The treaty also gave the Allies further reason to resist German terms. Timing brought these gains and costs together. The transferred divisions could fight that spring; fuller returns from the east would take longer, and American arrivals were strengthening the Allies. Germany needed a quick victory from its temporary advantage, and its offensives failed to deliver one.

AN INTERESTING FACT

The first Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk placed representatives of the revolution alongside its diplomats: a worker, a soldier, a sailor, a woman and a peasant. The woman, Anastasia Bitsenko, was a Socialist-Revolutionary recently amnestied from Siberian imprisonment for assassinating a tsarist general. The peasant, Roman Stashkov, had been recruited from the street at the last moment. Wheeler-Bennett recounts a dinner where a German prince asked Stashkov whether he preferred red or white wine. “Whichever is stronger,” he replied. The delegation’s speeches were also addressed beyond the German representatives, to the workers of Europe.

CHAPTER 12 · MAR–NOV 1918 · AUG 1918

The Spring Offensives and the Hundred Days

Germany’s leaders faced a narrowing opportunity in 1918. Divisions released from the east could strengthen an attack in France, but American troops were arriving to reinforce the Allies. Operation Michael began on 21 March with a short, intense bombardment. Stormtroopers passed around strongpoints and broke into the British Fifth Army’s front, carrying the German advance farther than any since 1914.

A breach was not yet a victory. The ground ahead had been devastated, and guns, ammunition and food struggled to reach infantry moving forward on foot. Later offensives made substantial salients but ran into the same difficulty. Ludendorff sought weak points in the line, without consistently choosing objectives whose loss would disrupt cooperation between the Allied armies. The Allies remained together; Germany had gained ground without securing a decisive objective.

The cost was severe. About a million German casualties included experienced assault troops who were especially difficult to replace. Under pressure, the Allies appointed Foch to coordinate their forces. The last German attack failed at the Marne in July, and the initiative passed to the Allies.

At Amiens on 8 August, Allied artillery, tanks, aircraft and infantry achieved surprise and advanced together. The tanks were useful, though unreliable; the attack also depended on shells, vehicles and coordination. Instead of letting one assault run on until it was exhausted, the Allies followed it with blows in other sectors. Germany had to move reserves from one threatened place to another, with fresh American manpower behind the Allied campaign.

The Western Front was only part of the strain on the Central Powers. Blockade and attrition had weakened Germany’s partners before defeats at Dobro Pole and Megiddo accelerated their collapse. Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary faced military defeat and mounting troubles at home. By late September Ludendorff was demanding an armistice.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Why the trench finally broke. A defended line became more vulnerable when artillery could calculate fire without warning registration shots. Infiltration or armor helped troops cross the defended zone, aircraft observed, and junior leaders directed local action. Both sides learned to break in. The problem was what followed: German trucks and useful tanks were few, and horses were exhausted. By August the Allies had more mechanical transport and ammunition, and could stop an attack before exhaustion and strike again. New methods challenged the deadlock of Chapter 5, but a successful advance still had to be supplied.

Ludendorff’s strategic vacuum. Asked for Michael’s objective, Ludendorff is reported to have said: “We chop a hole. The rest follows.” A hole in the line did give German troops room to advance, but the salients they gained lengthened their own front by roughly 120 kilometers. Depleted troops then had to hold it. Foch’s successive attacks had a different relationship to the larger campaign: by striking in several places, they obliged German reserves to respond repeatedly. Breaking a line and using the breach to defeat an enemy were separate achievements.

The American weight, actual and virtual. American troops fought at Belleau Wood, Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse–Argonne; roughly 26,000 Americans died in the last, the country’s deadliest battle. Their presence also mattered beyond their own sectors. Arrivals of around 10,000 a day gave the Allies a source of replacements Germany could not match. Ludendorff had sought victory before that weight became decisive. German surrender rates after Amiens suggest a loss of confidence as well, although the numbers alone cannot explain every surrender.

The soft fronts were structural. The coalition’s other armies entered the final campaigns with serious weaknesses. Bulgarian soldiers had spent a year on half-rations opposite a reinforced Salonika force. Ottoman manpower was exhausted, and Russia’s withdrawal had drawn some Ottoman troops to the Caucasus. Austria-Hungary faced hunger and desertion amid national tensions. Allied attacks still had to defeat these armies, but blockade, attrition and imperial overstretch had already made the coalition vulnerable across several fronts.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Five weeks, three armistices. The coalition came apart over five weeks. Bulgaria signed an armistice on 29 September, the Ottoman Empire on 30 October and Austria-Hungary on 3 November. The Habsburg army was disintegrating while its constituent peoples declared independence. Each departure exposed the partners still fighting and left Germany more isolated.

The birth of modern battle. Amiens showed how calculated surprise could bring artillery, infantry, aircraft and tanks into one attack. The Hundred Days extended the method through repeated blows across a broad front. Monash and Currie helped develop it; Fuller and Germans studying stormtroop tactics contributed to thinking about future warfare. Campaigns in 1939, 1944 and 1991 would use and adapt elements of combined arms under different technological and military conditions.

A defeat that fled the battlefield. Many German formations retreated in order, and the armistice arrived before Allied troops occupied Germany itself. Civilians at home therefore saw less of the rapid defeat that followed four largely static years. Ludendorff, who had demanded the armistice, later promoted the “stab-in-the-back” myth, blaming socialists, republicans and Jews for a defeat rooted in military and political collapse. That false account became a dangerous inheritance for the Weimar Republic.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Could a different German strategy have won in 1918, or were the spring offensives a hopeless gamble?

Germany had alternatives to the offensives it chose. It might have shortened its line, defended and sought a negotiated peace; the Hindenburg Line had resisted attacks well into 1918. But a settlement required terms acceptable to both sides. After Brest-Litovsk, German leaders had shown little willingness to relinquish gains such as Belgium, while American arrivals and financial support reduced Allied incentives to compromise. A narrower attack against the French or supply centers such as Amiens or Hazebrouck might have used German strength differently and perhaps prolonged the war, but it would still have faced Allied resources and growing American manpower. The actual offensives cost roughly a million casualties without forcing a decision. The U-boat campaign’s contribution to American entry and the eastern settlement had narrowed Germany’s choices before 1918. Victory is difficult to envisage under those constraints, though we cannot prove that every alternative would have failed.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Paris came under fire from about 120 kilometers away during the spring offensives. Krupp’s Paris Gun had a barrel more than thirty meters long and sent shells some forty kilometers into the stratosphere, among the first human-made objects to reach it. Each flight took roughly three minutes, and gunners allowed for the Earth’s rotation. The weapon had limited military value, but its shells killed civilians. On Good Friday, 29 March 1918, one brought down the roof of Saint-Gervais church on the congregation, killing 88 people, about a third of the gun’s total toll. German forces removed and destroyed the guns before the armistice; the Allies recovered no barrel.

CHAPTER 13 · NOVEMBER 1918 · NOV 1918

Armistice

The German fleet’s leaders ordered a last sortie in late October 1918. For the sailors at Kiel, the prospect was clear: they were being asked to risk their lives against the British fleet when a victory at sea could no longer change the outcome of the war. They refused. Their mutiny became a revolution, as workers’ and soldiers’ councils appeared across Germany. On 9 November the Kaiser abdicated, and a republic was proclaimed almost in passing.

Two days later civilian delegates signed an armistice at Compiègne. The agreement fixed eleven o’clock as the time when the guns would stop. Until then the armies continued fighting, and men died in the final minutes. The map shows the extent of the upheaval: four imperial systems were collapsing at once.

Germany’s armies were still outside much of German territory, a fact that later made it easier to pretend they had not been defeated. Yet they were retreating, more men were surrendering, and Germany’s allies were leaving the war. At home, the blockade and years of sacrifice had brought hunger and unrest. These crises belonged together: the sailors rebelled because the war was visibly lost, while the breakdown at home made continued resistance harder.

Ludendorff had demanded negotiations in September, but civilians signed the agreement. Germany had to evacuate occupied land and surrender weapons, and the blockade continued. These terms made a renewal of war nearly impossible without the casualties of an Allied invasion. They also left German civilians without the experience of seeing Allied armies in Berlin. Nationalists later exploited that gap, falsely claiming that republicans, socialists and Jews had stabbed an unbeaten army in the back.

Another catastrophe moved with the armies as they dispersed. Influenza traveled through camps, ships and demobilization routes, killing at least fifty million people worldwide; estimates for India alone reach twelve to eighteen million. The war did not cause the pandemic, but crowded quarters, hunger and movement helped it spread.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Collapse from the rear, forced from the front. The military and domestic crises reinforced each other. Germany’s army was retreating, surrendering in mass, losing its allies and facing a front weeks from rupture. At home, hunger, mutiny and revolution delivered the final push. The sailors refused to fight because defeat was visible; their refusal did not turn a winning war into a lost one. A story that takes only one side of this collapse serves a politics rather than an explanation. “undefeated in the field” fed the stab-in-the-back myth; “mere internal collapse” makes the blockade look like a bloodless victory. Front, economy and regime failed together.

Why an armistice, not a surrender. Ludendorff sought an armistice in September to save the army. By November the Allies were exhausted, and Wilson would negotiate with a German democracy; Germany hastily became one. The terms then interned the fleet, occupied the Rhineland, surrendered guns and continued the blockade. Though called an armistice, the agreement amounted to capitulation in substance: Germany could not resume the war. Ending the fighting spared lives without an Allied advance into Germany. It also meant that Germans did not see the instrument of their defeat, an absence that would cost the peace dearly.

The pandemic’s war logistics. Influenza did not originate in the war, but wartime conditions helped determine its scale and victims. Million-man camps and troopships brought people together in conditions suited to infection. Censorship suppressed warnings, while neutral Spain reported honestly, giving the disease its name “Spanish” flu. Malnourished populations had little reserve, and imperial routes carried infection along rail lines and rivers across this world map. The twentieth century’s deadliest single event deserves a place in the history of the war. Total war changed the conditions in which disease spread, and public health has planned against that precedent ever since.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Four empires, one map of hatching. Scrub to 1919 to see what replaces the empires: republics in Vienna and Berlin, Soviet power in the red east, and new states from Helsinki to Belgrade. The map also contains civil wars, border wars and pogroms. For Eastern Europe, “postwar” can conceal a continuing ordeal: fighting occurs somewhere on this map every month until 1923.

Demobilization into turmoil. Sixty-five million men return home to influenza, unemployment and politics shaped by the trenches. Veterans’ leagues and freikorps make street violence a governing style in half of Europe. Two Austrian-born corporals of this war and an Italian editor invalided out will build careers on the demobilized. The armies can be sent home; the habits and emotions of war are harder to put away.

Remembrance is invented. How should communities mourn men whose bodies could not be found? Half of Britain’s dead have no known grave, and many dead elsewhere were unburied or unlocatable. New civic forms gave that loss a place: the Unknown Soldier (1920), the two-minute silence, the poppy and the 54,000 names on the Menin Gate. States memorialize every common soldier by name for the first time. Tombs of the Unknown became a nearly universal legacy; visit any capital on this map and you will find one.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

Should the Allies have fought on to Berlin in 1919 instead of granting an armistice?

Pershing argued for continuing at the time, and many of Germany’s enemies made the case later. An occupation might have made defeat undeniable to Germans, depriving the stab-in-the-back myth of its force and perhaps preventing the next war. That is a serious political gain to set against the choice made in 1918. But commanders then faced a still-cohesive retreating army and projected hundreds of thousands of casualties in another year of fighting. Their own populations were weary, influenza was burning through every unit and revolution was spreading. The armistice already secured the essential terms. Foch called it “the conditions of victory without the losses of storming Germany,” and most historians find that judgment defensible on 1918’s information. The later loss of the narrative inside Germany shows why legitimacy mattered too. The Allies had won materially, yet within five years their victory was being explained away there. Whether an invasion could have prevented that outcome remains uncertain; its human cost, potentially a million more graves, was much more immediate. The choice has no comfortable answer.

AN INTERESTING FACT

New York celebrated the end of the war on 7 November, four days too soon. A garbled United Press cable from Brest announced peace; ticker tape fell and factories emptied. By some accounts, this “false armistice” brought bigger celebrations than the real one. On the actual morning, some American commanders kept attacking until the final minutes. Henry Gunther of Baltimore, killed at 10:59, is generally reckoned the last combat death of the war. A Congressional subcommittee investigated in 1919–20 why men had died taking ground the armistice was hours from handing over. No one was censured.

CHAPTER 14 · 1919 AND AFTER · FEB 1919

The Peace That Failed

The peacemakers faced a problem of population as well as power. From Finland to Yugoslavia, states were created or restored, including Poland. Self-determination promised peoples a say in their government, and these new states answered national claims that imperial rule had suppressed. But communities in central and eastern Europe lived intermingled. A boundary that brought one people into its national state could put another under a government it did not consider its own. Roughly twenty-five to thirty million Europeans became minorities in someone else’s nation-state.

The promise had a different reach outside Europe. Former German and Ottoman territories became League of Nations mandates administered by the victors rather than independent countries. Self-determination had helped justify the remaking of Europe, while the colonial world received almost none of the promised freedom.

At Versailles the victors had to decide what security would require of Germany. France, invaded twice within living memory, wanted a physical barrier against another attack. Britain wanted a Germany able to trade and balance French power. Wilson sought an order of open rules and collective security through the League. The resulting treaty limited Germany’s army, demilitarized the Rhineland and imposed reparations, but left Germany potentially powerful. Germans saw Article 231 as a symbol of imposed guilt.

Money tied the settlement to the victors’ own debts. France owed Britain, Britain owed the United States, and German reparations were expected to help service both. At the same time, the United States rejected the treaty and Britain drew back from firm guarantees. The settlement was too severe to win German consent and not strong enough to remove German power; the states expected to uphold it did not agree on how to do so.

These weaknesses did not make another world war automatic. The 1920s brought cooperation and peaceful revision, showing that the settlement could be changed without a general war. The Depression, dictatorship, weak enforcement and deliberate aggression later turned a vulnerable order into catastrophe. Versailles made that collapse possible; leaders still chose the course that brought it about.

WHY IT HAPPENED

Three peacemakers, three incompatible peaces. Each principal peacemaker had a different idea of what the war should secure. Clemenceau wanted France protected against a neighbor with twenty million more people. Wilson hoped rules could redeem the slaughter; Lloyd George wanted Germany punished but also able to trade and balance France. All three had electorates to satisfy (“Hang the Kaiser,” “make Germany pay”). The compromise satisfied no single theory: too Wilsonian to crush Germany, too Carthaginian to convert it, too compromised to inspire. Its clauses show the competing demands placed on a committee. Two powers that would decide Europe’s next war were missing from the durable settlement: Russia was uninvited, and America soon gone.

The reparations tangle. The demand for reparations was connected to debts among the victors. France owed Britain; Britain owed America; America alone insisted on repayment. German payments were the only source that could service the chain. Creditors’ books encouraged high sums, but collection was fitful and resentment total. The Ruhr occupation in 1923 followed, while hyperinflation gave propagandists a powerful gift. American loans subsequently supplied Germany with money to pay France, which could pay Britain, which could pay America. The circuit ran until 1929 cut the current. Keynes’ deeper point reaches beyond the arithmetic: treating Europe’s economy as a courtroom instead of a system would impoverish the victors too.

Self-determination’s impossible geometry. Self-determination was a powerful argument against the enemy empires, including Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman lands. The victors were less willing to accept it when their own arrangements were at issue. Austria could not join Germany, colonies remained under outside rule, and petitioners from Ireland to Ho Chi Minh went unheard. The selectivity was noticed immediately and everywhere; Wilson’s own Secretary of State privately called the phrase “loaded with dynamite.” In a region of mixed populations, the map made ethnicity a title-deed of statehood. Every dictator of the next twenty years would cite Paris’s principle while dismantling its map.

Enforcement: the peace nobody guarded. A treaty’s restrictions need someone willing to uphold them. The American guarantee died in the Senate, as did American membership of the League. Britain’s commitment faded with the memory of war, leaving France expected to police Europe alone. When France acted in the Ruhr in 1923, its own allies condemned it. By 1925 enforcement had become “appeasement” avant la lettre. The vacuum mattered more than the clauses themselves: a severe peace without enforcement brought resentment without the security its severity was meant to provide.

WHAT IT CHANGED

What 1919 genuinely built. The order failed within twenty years, but it also built institutions and supplied language that outlasted it. The flawed League of Nations was the first permanent machinery for collective security; the UN inherited its charter, court and agencies wholesale. The settlement produced the International Labour Organization and provided mandate accountability, however thin. Anticolonialists around the world seized Wilsonian language and never returned it. The order’s institutional DNA governs the one you live in.

The successor wars. The armistice and peace treaties did not bring fighting everywhere to an end. The Polish-Soviet war and Greco-Turkish catastrophe followed; the latter brought the compulsory “population exchange” of 1923, ethnic cleansing made a treaty instrument. Irish independence, Arab revolts against the mandates and Freikorps fighting in the Baltics belong to this aftermath too. Historians increasingly describe a “greater war” of 1912–1923. Scrub the last snapshots with that longer conflict in mind.

The twenty-year armistice. German opposition to war guilt and demands for revision reached well beyond the Nazis. Italy had its “mutilated victory,” Hungary its Trianon irredentism, and minorities could be made into pretexts. The Depression struck an order without shock absorbers. In 1936 Germany remilitarized the Rhineland while the enforcers watched. Our WW2 atlas begins at that moment, where this chapter’s consequences lead into its first chapter.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

“The Treaty of Versailles caused the Second World War.” Prosecute and defend that sentence.

The case against Versailles begins with its combination of humiliation and surviving German power. War guilt, reparations and unilateral disarmament gave German governments a common grievance and gave Hitler a platform. German minorities supplied pretexts, while Russia’s exclusion and America’s departure deprived the order of guardians. The defense has evidence too. Versailles was milder than Brest-Litovsk, Germany’s own 1918 blueprint, and than partition in 1945. Weimar suffered from the Depression, elite contempt for the republic and deliberate myth-making, including the army’s “stab-in-the-back,” as much as from treaty clauses. Moreover, the treaty was being revised peacefully: reparations effectively ended by 1932, before Hitler mattered. Versailles made the peace vulnerable and weakened the coalition that might have defended it, making later destructive choices cheaper. It did not make 1939 inevitable. The 1920s show that reconciliation was possible; the 1930s show the cost of abandoning enforcement. A policy of punishment or reconciliation needs the resources to carry it through.

AN INTERESTING FACT

On 3 October 2010 Germany paid about €70 million, the final payment on bonds floated in the 1920s to meet reparations. The debt had survived a long interruption: Hitler repudiated it, and the 1953 London Debt Agreement partially revived it while deferring the last tranche of interest until reunification. Germany reunited on 3 October 1990. The final invoice was settled on its twentieth anniversary, ninety-two years after the guns stopped.

EPILOGUE · 1919–1923 · JUL 1923

The New Map of Europe

The victors said that nations should govern themselves. Yet self-determination, a principle rather like independence decided by referendum, competed with their promises to allies and their power to take land from defeated states. The treaties with Germany’s allies show the results. Saint-Germain left Austria a German-speaking republic of about six and a half million people and prohibited union with Germany. At Trianon, Transylvania went from Hungary to Romania, Slovakia to Czechoslovakia, and Croatia and the Vojvodina to the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later called Yugoslavia. Neuilly deprived Bulgaria of its Aegean coast. Sèvres divided lands of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish state ruled by a sultan or emperor, among Britain, France, Italy and Greece.

Each defeated state had to accept the League of Nations, the new organization intended to settle disputes much like the United Nations today. Yet the defeated were initially barred from joining it. A body meant to protect the peace could therefore appear to them as an institution of the victors who had imposed it.

Other frontiers remained in dispute after the diplomats had met. Between 1919 and 1922 armies helped complete the map of eastern Europe. In 1920 Poland’s leader Józef Piłsudski marched on Kiev, hoping to establish a federation that would hold Russia back. The Red Army of communist Soviet Russia counterattacked and by August had reached the outskirts of Warsaw. A Polish counterstroke from the Wieprz river broke the advance. When Poland and Soviet Russia made peace at Riga in 1921, the border lay far east of the Curzon Line, which the Allies, the victors of 1918, had proposed along the edge of Polish settlement.

In Anatolia another war changed an intended settlement. Mustafa Kemal, an Ottoman general who rejected the sultan’s surrender, established a nationalist government in Ankara. His forces stopped the Greeks at the Sakarya river in 1921 and drove them out of Smyrna in 1922. The arrows on the map trace both this war and the Polish–Soviet struggle. In each, the subsequent treaty followed the battle line.

The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 replaced Sèvres and returned Eastern Thrace and the whole of Anatolia to Turkey. It also abolished the capitulations, under which foreigners in the Ottoman Empire had answered only to their own consuls’ courts—an arrangement rather like extending diplomatic immunity to entire merchant communities. A separate convention made the flight of Anatolia’s Christians part of a permanent exchange of populations. The Allies had accepted a frontier Turkish forces could hold, at a considerable human cost.

In western Europe, by contrast, France and Belgium tried to enforce a settlement Germany had not fulfilled. They occupied the Ruhr, Germany’s coal-and-steel heartland, in January 1923 to seize coal and timber owed as reparations for war damage. The German response was passive resistance: a general refusal to work for the occupiers. The government printed money to pay the strikers until the currency collapsed. Britain refused to participate, and the crisis ended only with the Dawes Plan of 1924, an American scheme that reduced German payments and supplied loans. The occupation exposed a division among the victors themselves. The blue belt on the 1923 map was weaker than it looked.

WHY IT HAPPENED

The method Versailles set. Versailles settled Germany’s frontiers in Chapter 14 and supplied a method for the other treaties: a Covenant, or founding charter, for the League of Nations, reparations and new borders. Applying it farther east presented a different problem. The defeated states were smaller and weaker, ethnic populations were more tangled, and the victors had promised their allies territory that belonged to the losers.

Empires that collapsed into a vacuum. The peacemakers arrived after political authority had already collapsed across much of Europe. Three empires fell in twenty months, from the Tsar’s abdication in March 1917 to the collapse of Austria-Hungary and Germany in November 1918; the Ottoman Empire, a fourth, was being dismembered. At the armistice nobody controlled the lands between Germany and Russia. National councils proclaimed new states in Prague, Zagreb, Warsaw and the Baltic capitals before the conference met. Rival claims did not wait for its decision: Poland and Lithuania, for example, contested Vilnius, and armies decided. The conference often ratified facts established on the ground.

Promises made in wartime. The victors had made territorial promises to attract allies during the war. Under the Treaty of London of 1915, Italy was offered South Tyrol, Istria and much of Dalmatia; Romania was promised Transylvania in 1916. Britain had promised Arab independence, a Jewish national home in Palestine and a division of the Middle East with France. These commitments could conflict when peace came. The strongest claimant usually prevailed, leaving disappointed Italian nationalists and Arab leaders, as well as defeated states, to resent the settlement.

The Bolshevik challenge. The settlement also reflected fear of revolution. Soviet Russia was excluded from the peace conference and treated as a danger to contain, while Lenin expected revolution to spread westward. Short-lived Soviet republics in Hungary and Bavaria made the danger seem immediate in 1919. The victors backed strong new states on Russia’s border, accepted Romania’s annexation of Bessarabia and tolerated Poland’s expansion eastward. They were trying to contain Moscow as well as Berlin; Moscow saw the resulting map as a hostile wall.

WHAT IT CHANGED

Guardians and revisionists. The new map gave governments different interests in its survival. France allied with Poland in 1921 and later signed treaties with the Little Entente—Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia—to support the settlement. Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria wanted revision, and Fascist Italy, a disappointed victor, increasingly joined them. Most guardians of the settlement were new, small states with divisions of their own; among the revisionists was the strongest economy on the continent. The balance favored those seeking to redraw the map.

Minorities as pretexts. Some 25 to 30 million Europeans lived in another nation’s state. Treaties supervised by the League promised them equality before the law and schools in their own language, but a promise needed a means of enforcement. League procedures were slow, many complaints were set aside, and governments in Warsaw, Bucharest and Belgrade pressed assimilation. In the 1930s Nazi Germany used German minorities’ grievances in Czechoslovakia and Poland as pretexts to break up the settlement. Minority protection had become a weapon against the states that had undertaken it.

Hyperinflation and the radical right. By November 1923, after the Ruhr crisis drove German inflation out of control, a lifetime’s savings could not buy a loaf of bread. That month Adolf Hitler, the leader of a small Munich party, believed the republic was about to fall. He attempted to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch, an armed coup launched from a Munich beer hall. It failed, and he went to prison. For millions of Germans, however, occupation and hyperinflation left the treaty, the republic and ruin linked in a single memory.

From Lausanne to the next war. The wars of 1919–1922 hardened the belief that stable frontiers required nations of a single people. The Lausanne exchange gave that belief international approval. In 1944 Winston Churchill cited it when defending the expulsion of Germans from lands Poland would gain; the policy was carried out in 1945, after Nazi Germany’s war of conquest and occupation. The next war had begun in 1939 over Danzig, the German port made a Free City by the peace, and the Polish Corridor, which cut East Prussia off from Germany. The settlement had drawn those fault lines years earlier.

DISCUSSION QUESTION

“In 1919–1923 armies drew the map of Europe, and treaties only signed it.” How far do you agree?

Armies mattered most clearly in the east and south-east. Poland’s eastern frontier followed the battle line of 1920, Vilnius and Memel were seized by force, and Lausanne recognized the frontier won by Kemal’s army. Here treaties recorded results that soldiers had made possible. The claim fits the center and west less well. Versailles, Saint-Germain and Trianon drew frontiers that no army fought over in 1919, and the defeated states were too weak to resist. Diplomats did not make every decision alone there either. Plebiscites, votes in which local people chose their state much like referendums, settled Schleswig and Upper Silesia; new states had already been proclaimed in Prague and Zagreb. Drawing a border and keeping it were separate problems. Lines could be placed on paper, but those that lasted had force behind them or the consent of people living along them. The 1923 map was unstable because its borders outran the willingness to defend them—a gap governments of every era should consider before signing.

AN INTERESTING FACT

Polish commanders at Warsaw had help from people listening to the enemy’s radio traffic. From 1919 a small Polish radio-intelligence unit read large numbers of Red Army messages; a young lieutenant, Jan Kowalewski, played the leading part. By August 1920 the commanders knew the positions and orders of Tukhachevsky’s armies, including the thinly held southern flank. According to one operator, a Warsaw radio station also jammed Soviet transmissions at the decisive moment by broadcasting passages from the Bible. The same Polish cipher service broke the German Enigma machine in 1932 and passed its methods to Britain and France in July 1939, five weeks before the next war began.