The First World War

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about the history of the great world war. It covers the major strategic themes and goes in-depth on the conflicts outside of the Western front. It is a book that focuses on the war and only the war.

🎨 Impressions

I found it to be an insightful and informative book that is more detailed than I am used to when it comes to history. As my thoughts have been focused more on logistics and the economy as part of the war, it was interesting for me to read the book with that context in mind. Books such as [[Europe/How the War was Won]] by Phillips O´Brien show that the economy is uber alles in modern warfare. And to be sure, the great war was the first modern war. I also found it interesting how personal cognitive biases often hampered the success of battle and this was one of the factors that ultimately led to the defeat of the Axis powers. Also, German high-handedness in the face of their allies was deemed to be a fatal flaw. Many interesting quotes from the book.

How I Discovered It

I wanted to learn more about the Great War and this was a recommended reading.

Who Should Read It?

As the great war shaped the history of the 20th century it is recommended for all who want to understand modern history.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I get more and more astonied by the lack of clearly holistic views. And how little information the people high up in the command chain had. There are many things to digest from this book, but I think the book has clear and insightful lessons on leadership and management.

✍️ My Top Quotes

The notion that British soldiers were ‘lions led by donkeys’ continues to provoke a debate that has not lost its passion, even if it is now devoid of originality.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, that ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’, is, he insists, ‘an old lie’.
When the First World War began, historians, especially in Imperial Germany, identified a ‘long’ nineteenth century, starting with the French Revolution in 1789 and ending in 1914. For their successors that was when the ’short’ twentieth century began, and it ended with the conclusion of the Cold War in 1990.
Although he was heir apparent to his aged uncle, Franz Josef, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, his wife was treated according to the rank with which she had been born, that of an impoverished Czech aristocrat.
For Austria-Hungary, the situation in the Balkans was as much a matter of domestic politics as of foreign policy. The empire consisted of eleven different nationalities and many of them had ethnic links to independent states that lay beyond its frontiers.
The head of Serb military intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevi, code-named Apis, was one of a group of officers who had murdered the previous king in 1903. An enthusiastic promoter of the idea of a greater Serbia and a member of a secret terrorist organisation, the Black Hand, he was ‘incapable of distinguishing what was possible from what was not and perceiving the limits of responsibility and power’.
‘Poli-tics’, he stated, ‘consists precisely of applying war as method.’
Its government had been liberalised in response to the 1905 revolution and its annual growth rate was 3. percent. Between 1908 and 1913 its industrial production increased by 50 percent, an expansion which was largely fuelled by defence-related output. Russia’s army was already the biggest in Europe. By 1917 it would be three times the size of Germany’s.
The trial of Madame Caillaux, wife of the former radical prime minister Joseph Caillaux, began on 20 July. She had shot the editor of Le Figaro, who had published the love letters exchanged between herself and her husband: on 28 July the gallant French jury acquitted her on the grounds that this was a crime passionel.
Their wishful thinking reflected Conrad’s: this was to be the Third Balkan War, not the First World War.
Over 2000, Bosnians were deported or interned, some of them Muslims who had fled to Bosnia to escape the Orthodox Serbs.*
‘Our troops’, one soldier serving with the Honved reported, ‘have struck out terribly in all directions, like the Swedes in the Thirty Years War. Nothing, or almost nothing, is intact. In every house individuals are to be seen searching for things that are still useable.’
Within four months Austria-Hungary’s casualties totalled 957,000 more than twice the army’s pre-war strength.
By 1914, the German colonies attracted one in a thousand of Germany’s emigrants, absorbed 3 percent of Germany’s overseas investment, and accounted for 0.5 percent of its overseas trade. Territorial expansion was not a high priority for Germany, and it was not a cause of the First World War.
Germany industrialized late but very rapidly. The value of its output increased well over six times between 1855 and 1913.
In 1870 Britain, with 32 percent of the world’s manufacturing capacity, was the largest industrial power in the world. By 1910, it had been overtaken by the United States, which had 35 percent of the world’s manufacturing capacity, and Germany with 15 percent; Britain now had 14 percent.
The chancellor of Germany held office because he was the Kaiser’s choice, not because he enjoyed a majority in the Reichstag. His success as chancellor largely depended on his ability to manage the Reichstag despite the lack of a party base.
But it might appease the socialists, who became the largest single party in the Reichstag in the 1912 elections.
Moltke was not unusual among professional servicemen in anticipating that any future European war would be long, nor uncharacteristic among his own class in fearing that such a war would have revolutionary domestic consequences.
Until 1914 Germany relied on Chile for imports of saltpetre, from which it produced fixed nitrogen. Nitric acid was needed for explosives, and nitrogen for fertilisers and therefore for food production.
In 1914 only 5. percent of German reservists came from big cities; as a result the army was comparatively untouched by the socialism that seemed to threaten the Reich from within.
Over a period of three days the allies were defeated along the entire length of the front. Forty thousand French soldiers were killed, and by 29 August their casualties totalled 260,000.
Employing delayed-action fuses for ricochet fire, a 75mm battery was able to sweep an area of 4 hectares, 400 meters deep, in 40 to 50 seconds. Its four guns, firing ten rounds of shrapnel a minute, discharged 10, balls. This was far more effective against advancing infantry than machine guns.
Germany had, however, made two significant gains, even if both were incidental. First, it had overrun almost all Belgium as well as the industrial heartlands of north-eastern France, including 74 percent of its coal production and 81 percent of its pig iron. Second, it held so much French territory, and did so along positions which in many cases were so extraordinarily well adapted for fighting defensively, that it retained the advantages of an offensive strategy.
Before the war the socialist Jean Jaurès had been criticised by the radical right for his internationalism and his advocacy of a pure citizen army. But when he was assassinated by a solitary maverick on 31 July 1914, his death became symbolic for the right as well as the left. This was a Jaurèsian war: a war of national self-defence.
He was one of over 2 million Africans who served in the war as soldiers and labourers: 10 percent of them died, and among the labourers the rate may have reached 20 percent. These were casualty rates comparable with those on the western front.
To many whites it seemed self-evident that the use of colonial troops to topple other European powers could only be self-destructive in the long term. War would rekindle the very warrior traditions that colonialism had been designed to extirpate, and ultimately the black trained to use a rifle against a white enemy might turn his weapon on his own white ruler.
A German journalist greeted the party on its arrival by asking its commander, Hellmuth von Mücke, which he would prefer, a bath or Rhine wine: ‘Rhine wine,’ replied von Mücke.
By January 1915 German surface vessels had accounted for 215, of the 273, tons of merchant shipping sunk, but that was only 2 percent of British commercial tonnage.
The key to his approach was the use of mounted infantry on the lines favoured by the Afrikaners in both their previous campaigns. But horses in East Africa inevitably succumbed to the tsetse fly. The British knew which were the worst regions for fly, because German veterinarians had obligingly supplied them with maps before the war, but this information was not incorporated in the campaign plan.
The 2nd Rhodesia Regiment had an effective strength of 800 men, but with a wastage rate of 20 percent per month it was often reduced to 100 men.
In the Cameroons German pastors were interned and German doctors fled to Muni: the French took over much of the colony in 1916 but were in no position to provide replacements. Education collapsed and witchcraft revived. In South-West Africa, the South Africans wisely left the German settlers in place - at least until the peace settlement in 1919.
‘We were not fighting for the French’, Kamadon Mbaye, a Senegalese, recalled; ‘we were fighting for ourselves [to become] French citizens.’
In Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, the Sheikh-ul-Islam declared an Islamic holy war against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro on 14 November 1914.
In 1914, of 270 million Muslims in the world in 1914, only about 30 million were governed by other Muslims. Almost 100 million were British subjects; 20 million were under French rule, most of them in North and Equatorial Africa; and another 20 million were incorporated in Russia’s Asian
In 1914, of 270 million Muslims in the world in 1914, only about 30 million were governed by other Muslims. Almost 100 million were British subjects; 20 million were under French rule, most of them in North and Equatorial Africa; and another 20 million were incorporated in Russia’s Asian empire.
The First World War may have been a war in which men were motivated by big ideas, but that of Islam failed to override the loyalties of temporal rule.
France jockeyed for position in Syria and Palestine. Britain had interests in Iraq, both as a buffer for India and because of the discovery of oil: its first oil-fired battleship, HMS Queen Elizabeth, was laid down in 1912.
Ideally, Britain would still have preferred to keep the Ottoman Empire out of the war rather than push it in, but nothing it did served that aim. Those in Turkey’s government who espoused neutrality found little to support their policy.
His units were short of boots and groundsheets, and those with the deepest snow to traverse were instructed to leave their packs and greatcoats behind. The mildest temperature in the entire operation was -20°C. The Turks’ supplies ran out on 25 December. The Russians held Sarikamish and then counterattacked in the first week of the new year. The 3rd Army was shattered. Its total casualties were at least 75, men, and some estimates rise as high as 90,. The majority fell not in battle but to the terrain, the climate, the supply situation and the lack of medical care.
It is impossible to say precisely how many Armenians died. Part of the problem is uncertainty as to how many were living in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 in the first place. Calculations range from 1. million to about 2. million.
By the end of 1918 mortality in the coastal towns of Lebanon may have reached 500,000.
Both the Central Powers and the Entente were actively competing for allies in the Balkans. Indeed, the possibility that Greece might side with the British in August 1914, and that therefore its army would be available for use against Turkey, was what had first triggered the Gallipoli idea in Churchill’s mind.
Both the British and the French were convinced of the latent power of the ‘Russian steam-roller’. It seemed to them that Russia had the men to mount the more effective challenge to the Central Powers if only it had the arms with which to equip them.
Little wonder, then, that many Germans thought the Dardanelles campaign was the most important of the war in 1915.
The Turks had plenty of warning that a naval attack up the narrows might be a possibility, and with German help had done much to improve their defences. ‘My first impression’, the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, recorded of a tour of the defences, ‘was that I was in Germany
18 March an attempt was made to ‘rush through’ the straits using warships in daylight. Carden fell sick on the morning of the attack, and his deputy, Admiral John de Robeck, described what happened as a disaster. Three ships - two British and one French — were sunk by mines. Churchill maintained - as have others — that if the attack had been renewed on the next day it would have succeeded, because the Turks were running low on munitions. They were not
The navy’s major contribution thereafter was also submarine - sinking the Turkish merchant vessels supporting the troops on the peninsula; the Turks lost half their merchant fleet in the campaign.
Gallipoli has been defined as the moment when Australia came of age as a nation.
Most of the Anzac soldiers on whom he reported. They fought not for Australia or New Zealand but for the ‘old country’, with which they still had strong ties of kinship and sentiment
Moreover, most of them were city-dwellers, not the bronzed ‘diggers’ from the outback of popular legend. Nor were they necessarily more natural soldiers than any other troops in this war. Morale came close to collapse on 25 April.
Only 30 per cent of British casualties in the campaign (Gallipoli) were sustained in battle.
It was not only Australian and New Zealand national identity that was forged at Gallipoli, it was also Turkey’s. This was a major victory, less for the Ottoman Empire than for the ethnically and geographically more defined state that emerged from the First World War. Moreover, although many of the architects of the defensive battle were German, it produced a Turkish hero who became the founder of that state, Mustafa Kemal.
However, the supply arrangements of the Russians had been neglected before the war and collapsed as soon as they started their advance.
The chief of the general staff, Moltke, had told him: ‘When the Russians come, not defence only, but offensive, offensive, offensive’.
Samsonov confronted the reality. He went off into the forest and shot himself.
‘The Germans’, a Russian guards officer recalled, ‘had a line for every army corps and sometimes even for a division . . . Roughly, the Russian army had one line to supply an army of three or four army corps .
But once the German army operated beyond its own frontier, it was subject to the same constraints as the Russian. That was precisely the reason why Schlieffen had forsaken his predecessors’ predilection for a war in the east and devoted greater attention to Germany’s western front.
Falkenhayn and Ludendorff had flared into an open hostility which was to deepen over the next eighteen months and divide strategic counsels in Germany.
*But on 4 November Falkenhayn, now publicly appointed chief of the general staff, renewed the attack at Ypres. It failed, with a total German casualty bill of 80,*000
The debate between ‘westerners’ and ’easterners’ in Germany was far more real than the one between soldiers and politicians in Britain that went under the same title.
One can only love or hate’, Ludendorff told Groener, ‘and I hate General von Falkenhayn.’
Russian losses since May totaled 1. million men. More than half of them were prisoners of war. And that was true for the war as a whole, not just for the summer of 1915. In a major action on the western front casualties normally divided one-third dead, one-third wounded and one-third captured, and, averaged over the war as a whole, the proportion of prisoners of war in relation to total losses was much smaller.
But Russia’s casualty profile is also revealing of the morale of the Russian army. Before the war the incidence of strikes - which had both soared in number and become increasingly politicised - peaked in July 1914, and conservatives had warned against war for its ability to stoke revolution.
Russia had failed to maximise its potential. It raised 15 million men in the war, a massive number in absolute terms, but only 39 percent of its population of military age. France, with a population one-quarter the size of Russia‘s, drafted 79 percent of its male population of military age to create an army half as strong. Britain, which did not introduce conscription until 1916, and which argued that its contribution to the war was industrial and economic, still enlisted 49 percent of its men aged fifteen to forty-nine for military service.
Many German Jews were, however, repelled by the Jews of the east, who not only dressed and behaved very differently from themselves but also were more fervent in their beliefs. ‘No, I did not belong to these people, even if one proved my blood relation to them a hundred times over,’ wrote Victor Klem-perer,
Russia certainly rallied in an extraordinary fashion in the winter of 1915-. Shell production for field guns rose month on month despite the loss of territory and plant, doubling between May and July 1915 to reach 852, rounds in the latter month, and 1. million in November. Total output in 1915 was 11. million rounds, in 1916 28. million. The strength of the field army, which had fallen to 3. million men in mid-September 1915, recovered to 6. million men by February 1916 and 6. million on 1 June.
‘Revolution’, he said, citing Napoleon, ‘is an idea that has found bayonets.’
Enzo Valentino, an eighteen-year-old volunteer from Perugia, asked his mother from the front on 3 September, ‘why you persist in imagining and believing a lot of things which I do not write to you? ... To be always going forward, and soon to be about to make a great advance? I have never heard anything of all this. As to advancing, it is now a month and a half that I have been up here and always in the same place.’ In the same letter he reported the first fall of the snow. Seven weeks later he was killed by shrapnel fire, an edelweiss in his cap, as he ran forward, shouting ‘Savoia, Savoia, Italia’.
The Serbs suffered the greatest losses in relation to population size of any participant in the war.
Relations between Conrad and Falkenhayn became so bad that for almost a full month, between 22 December 1915 and 19 January 1916, there was no direct communication. In that time strategies for 1916 were set.
There are five families of rats in the roof of my dug-out,‘ Captain Bill Murray reported back to his family on 14 May 1915, ’which is two feet above my head in bed, and the little rats practise back somersaults continuously through the night, for they have discovered that my face is a soft landing when they fall.‘
The intensely cultivated soil of Belgium and northern France, well tilled and manured, meant that wounds were rapidly infected with gas gangrene: 21 percent of French soldiers wounded in the legs or thighs died as a result.
In wars before that of 1914- disease, not battle, was the major killer. On the western front it was not - a product of major advances in preventive military medicine as well as of the fact that it was wounds which introduced many of the more life-threatening infections. Disease was still a principal cause of death in every other theatre of war.
German deaths per month were highest in 1914 on the western front, in 1915 on the eastern front, and in 1918 again in the west - in other words when and where they were on the attack.
French monthly losses peaked at 238, in September 1914, the month of the Marne. Their next worst month was October 1915, when an offensive in Champagne (which formed the centrepiece of Bernier’s autobiographical novel) pushed the tally up to 180,000. Thereafter they rose above 100,000 on only three occasions in the war, never in 1916 - despite the battle of Verdun - and twice in 1918, when the war became mobile again.
Longer hours of daylight in the summer gave more opportunity to kill, although even these major offensives had to close down by November. But
*A million helmets, made of hardened manganese steel, were issued to the British army in the first half of 1916, with the result that head wounds fell by over 75 percent
The French were experimenting with helmets when the war broke out, and issued the Adrian helmet in mid-1915.
The quick-firing 75mm field gun, the agent of the French victory on the Marne, could loose fifteen - and some claimed twenty - rounds a minute, and a battery of four guns could fire off its total stock in a couple of hours. Static war minimised the logistical constraints, especially as light railways replaced horse-drawn transport, but increased the numbers of targets.
1914 7. million French women already had jobs, and they made up 32 percent of the total workforce; by the war’s end they accounted for 40 percent of the workforce. In Britain women workers rose from just under 6 million, or 26 percent of the workforce, to just
In August 1914 Louis Renault said that his car factories could manufacture shells using turning lathes rather than hydraulic presses. The resulting shell had to be made in two parts because the lathes could not shape the shell’s nose cone. The so-called ‘bi-blocs’ helped overcome France’s shell shortage, but their weaknesses generated shortages in other areas: over 600 French guns were destroyed - and their crews killed or injured - by premature explosions in 1915.
Germany likewise used turning lathes to produce what it called ’auxiliary ammunition’ from cast iron: in 1915 it lost 2,000 field guns and 900 light howitzers to premature explosions, as many as were disabled by enemy action.
In January 1915 one German observer reckoned that half the shells fired by the French were duds.
At the battle of the Somme in July 1916 25 percent of British guns were put out of action as a result of design faults and inferior materials, and 30 percent of shells failed to explode.
Linear, positional warfare exacerbated this trend, forcing the commander to place himself behind his troops. The German response to the problem was to delegate command forward, confining instructions to general directives and avoiding detailed orders. British officers were used to smaller forces and more hands-on command in colonial campaigns.
British generals were in fact ‘too eager to get away from their desks’. What they found hard to accept was that vital decisions were being taken at lower levels of authority.
Total Entente losses reached a quarter of a million for minimal gain. Foiled in his attempt at breakthrough, Joffre fell back on another rationale for his attack: ‘We shall kill more of the enemy than he can kill of us’.
Haig, however, decided that Verdun had fulfilled the function of the wearing-out battle and that he now had the opportunity to break through. He wanted a hurricane bombardment and a deeper and faster advance: ’D. H. is for breaking the line and gambling on rushing the third line on top of a panic,‘ Rawlinson wrote in his diary on 1 April.
Tawney survived to become a famous historian, but of the 57,000 British casualties that day 19,000 did not. Nowhere had the advance reached its objectives.
Between mid-July and mid-September Haig convinced himself that the Germans were ‘off balance’ and about to collapse. Many of the ninety attacks launched in this period were small affairs: ill-coordinated, hurried and launched on narrow fronts, they gained under three square miles of ground for 82, casualties. Haig rationalised his failure to achieve breakthrough by saying that his purpose was now attrition.
Because in time of war the state gave priority to feeding its direct defenders, the soldier and the factory worker, those most likely to suffer from shortages were the militarily useless, the old and the weak. Death rates among epileptics in Bethel, near Bielefeld, rose from 3. percent in 1914 to 16. percent in 1917, and in all Prussian sanatoriums from 9. percent to 28. percent
Germany produced enough food to feed itself in the war. On the basis that an average daily intake of 2, calories was the norm, the German population experienced real hardship only in the months immediately after the failed harvest of 1916. In February 1917 daily rations dropped to 1, calories per person. This so-called ‘turnip winter’ - when turnips replaced potatoes - makes the point. Germans saw the turnip as animal feed.
The War Food Office, created in 1916 under the auspices of the Prussian Ministry of War, recognised ’the meaningful influence that coffee and quasi-coffee drinks had on the general morale of the population‘, and deemed it a ’most important food‘.
Over 800 types of substitute sausage were recognised by the war’s end, and over 10, other Ersatz foods. Indeed Ersatz itself ceased to mean substitute and came to mean fake.
In July 1916 the Germans court-martialled Charles Fryatt, master of the Brussels, a British merchant vessel, on the grounds that on 28 March 1915 he had attempted to ram a U-boat although not himself a member of a combatant service. Fryatt was executed. In terms of propaganda and diplomatic effect, Fryatt’s ‘deliberate murder’, as the New York Times called it, worked in Britain’s favour.
After March 1918 a woman with venereal disease could be arrested for having sex with her husband if he were a serviceman, even if he had first infected her.
Moving coal by rail from the Donets basin and the Urals to factories in the north-west further depleted what was available to the end user. Blast furnaces fell idle for lack of fuel.
In January 1917, an agent of the secret police reported that ‘Children are starving in the most literal sense of the word. A revolution’, he concluded, ‘if it takes place will be spontaneous, quite likely a hunger riot.’
The strategic logic was now the reverse of that adopted in December: the Italians were also not ready to attack, so that now the western front offensive was justified precisely because there were not going to be attacks on the other fronts.
Fast-acting graze fuses meant that shells did not bury themselves in the ground, breaking it up and losing their force, but exploded on impact, and in particular cut barbed wire. This firepower was used more discriminatingly: bombardments elsewhere along the line deceived the enemy as to the true point of attack, and intelligence focused the guns on the key sectors. Of nearly 1,000 heavy guns, 377 were concentrated on a 6-km front facing Vimy Ridge, a high point commanding the plain to Douai and the east.
The deterioration in the weather slowed the attack in subsequent days, but so did the impossibility of progressing beyond the range of effective artillery support: in the case of field artillery cutting wire, this was about 2, yards. However, the battle of Arras achieved its principal strategic objective: the Germans doubled their strength in the sector within a week.
Nivelle had collected enough guns on his 40-km front to allocate one field gun and one trench mortar for every 23 metres and one heavy gun for every 21 metres. But the depth of the German positions meant that the number of guns per metre of enemy trench was half that. The Germans had ample intelligence of French intentions, and they had 100 machine-guns for every 1, yards of front.
At Berry-au-Bac and Juvincourt, tanks, used in numbers for the first time by the French, carried so much petrol that some caught fire, and the remainder outstripped the exhausted infantry meant to accompany them. By the end of the first day, of 132 tanks 57 had been destroyed and 64 had become bogged
On 8 May Pétain was appointed to succeed Nivelle as commander-in-chief. He responded to the complaints about leave and rest. He handled the mutinies with restraint: of 629 soldiers condemned to death between May and October 1917, only 43 were executed. But he also embarked on a programme of political education for the troops, emphasising the wider strategy of the war and the contribution to its purpose that the United States’s entry would make.
Haig saw what was in front of him, and interpreted that in the best possible light: his devout Presbyterianism gave him an inner certainty which interpreted setbacks as challenges, a not undesirable quality in a commander. He believed he could achieve a breakthrough in 1917, and would rationalise his battle as attrition only if he failed.
Nor did the total number of courts martial rise exponentially, particularly when set against the increasing size of the army. An end-of-year report based on 17,000 letters concluded that morale was sound. The traditional paternalism of a long-service army - rest and recreation, food and drink, good officer-men relations - acted as an effective disciplinary tool even for conscripts. The British army did not mutiny - at least, not on a scale which bears comparison with the French.
The four battles on the River Isonzo in 1915 were followed by five more in 1916, and two in 1917.
Cadorna attributed his defeat not to tactical incompetence but to anti-militarism and defeatism in Italy as a whole.
In Britain Haig’s standing slumped in the aftermath of Passchendaele. Lloyd George now possessed the political authority to remove him, if he could find a credible alternative.
The new Chief of the Imperial General Staff was General Sir Henry Wilson, an Irish unionist and a man whose love of intrigue was so great that the sight of a politician was said to induce in him a state of sexual excitement. Haig both distrusted and disliked him.
Arthur Zimmermann convinced the Kaiser and the army that the Bolsheviks’ leader, Lenin, who was living in exile in Switzerland, should
The treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest defined what a German victory meant. ‘For those who think Germany will be satisfied with a peace of conciliation’, wrote a French gunner, the Russians’ cowardice ‘will have made them see what defeat would mean on our front.
Russia and Romania were not the only losers at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest. So, too, were advocates everywhere of a negotiated peace, and they included liberals in Germany.
‘Great indignation with the Kaiser who spends hours supervising the building of a fountain at Homburg, for which a war contractor has raised the money’, wrote Georg von Müller in his diary on 7 August 1916. While his soldiers slogged it out at Verdun and on the Somme, ‘He went for an excursion to Saalburg and Friedrichshof this afternoon and refused to read a report from Hindenburg on the situation on the Eastern Front because “he had no time”’.
Unable to hold the line, Falkenhayn pulled back to the hills north of Jerusalem, resting his right flank on Jaffa. In February 1918 he was recalled to Germany, but not before he had intervened to prevent the resettlement of the Jews; they were reckoned to be spying, but neither the Germans nor Talât, elevated to become Ottoman Grand Vizier in February 1917, wanted a repeat of the Armenian massacres.
All told, about 1. million soldiers, albeit older and less fit than those in the west, remained on the eastern front in 1918. They ate a great deal of the food that they were trying to procure for their civilian populations.
Moreover, the root cause of food shortages in the Habsburg Empire, and a contributory factor in Germany itself, was transport.
Holtzendorff had calculated that, if Germany could sink 600,000 tons of British shipping a month for five months, Britain would have to make peace. The navy delivered: it sank 860,000 tons in April, and exceeded its target in May and June. Given that it had only about thirty submarines on station at any one time, that was a remarkable achievement: before the war it was thought 222 would be needed for an effective blockade of Britain.
‘Look well at the loaf on your breakfast table and treat it as if it were real gold,’ declared Kennedy Jones, director-general of food economy, in a speech in Edinburgh in May 1917, ‘because the British loaf is going to beat the German.’
Neither Hindenburg nor Ludendorff would do so, especially when they and others were increasingly thinking in terms of the ‘Second Punic War’. If the current world war did not secure the full package of German war aims, it would have to be followed by another.
Third, many of the fronts, particularly the principal one in the west, were genuinely shared responsibilities. Germany shored up the western front single-handedly, but then on other fronts could expect its allies to act as virtual mercenaries, providing the cannon fodder for German commanders to use according to German priorities. There were Entente fronts, pre-eminently the Italian, which were largely sustained by the army of one nation, but that army sustained its legitimacy by acting in conformity with its own national objectives.
’I shall fight without ceasing‘, he was reported to have said to a group of officers. ’I shall fight in front of Amiens. I shall fight in Amiens. I shall fight behind Amiens. I shall fight all the time.‘
It also had few tanks. The French had attacked with 375 Renault light tanks on 18 July. These were the brainchild of Jean-Baptiste Estienne, a French artillery officer, whose service in an aviation unit before the war had awoken him to the possibilities of inter-arm tactical cooperation.
The breakdown rate of tanks in the First World War was very high - the speed pf most ranged between 2 and 4 mph across country - and their range was restricted. The argument that the British had forfeited their surprise value by using them prematurely on the Somme in September 1916 is nonsense: here was an imperfect but evolving weapon which needed the benefit of combat experience.
The tank was the most striking evidence of a number of points: that the Entente tackled the integration of science, technology and tactics with greater success than the Germans; that the link between tactical experience and factory production was a continuous loop, involving fresh blueprints and the rejigging of machine-tools and plant, as well as feeding munitions into the battle; that by 1918 the Entente, not the Central Powers,
The tank was the most striking evidence of a number of points: that the Entente tackled the integration of science, technology and tactics with greater success than the Germans; that the link between tactical experience and factory production was a continuous loop, involving fresh blueprints and the rejigging of machine-tools and plant, as well as feeding munitions into the battle; that by 1918 the Entente, not the Central Powers, derived greater benefit from the trade-off between the mass army and mass production; and that the ultimate benefit was on the battlefield, in the reintegration of fire and movement.
In the last year of the war, Britain, France and the United States jointly produced an average of 11,000 machines and 14,000 aero engines per month; the German equivalents were each below 2,000
The biggest single intellectual shift in making war between 1914 and 1918 was that the combined-arms battle was planned around the capabilities of the guns rather than of the infantry.
By November the Royal Artillery had perfected the techniques of predicted fire. It used microphones to record from different points the low-frequency sound waves following the firing of a gun in order to take a cross-bearing and locate the position of an enemy battery. Unlike aerial observation or the visual spotting of gun flashes, both also methods of immense value in identifying targets, sound-ranging could be used in bad visibility. Consequently, artillery could register its guns in advance of an attack without the preliminary bombardment that had squandered surprise in the past, particularly when the tanks could themselves take on the tasks of crushing wire and destroying enemy machine-gun nests.
In a war in which 70 per cent of all casualties were attributed to artillery it was a fatal weakness.
British non-battle casualties in Macedonia exceeded battle casualties by twenty to one.
Venizelos argued that joining the Entente would open the door to a greater Greece, and in 1916 secured the Entente’s recognition for a provisional government in Thessalonica.
Revolutions broke out in Vienna and Budapest on 31 October. Austria secured an armistice on 3 November*
For them the most direct consequence was the continuation of the blockade until the peace treaty was signed. Moreover, with no effective opposition and with unfettered access to the one sea that had remained a German enclave, the Baltic, the allies were able to apply it with a level of severity that had eluded them in the war. The winter of 1918-, even more than the war years, determined the Germans’ and Austrians’ folk memories of hunger as an instrument of war.
Before the peace treaty was signed one member of the British delegation, John Maynard Keynes, resigned in protest at the harshness of the terms, and then published a hugely successful popular book in order to damn its economic clauses. The Economic Consequences of the Peace prepared the way for liberal doubters, who were further exploited by the Germans’ response to article 231 of the treaty.
About 10 million soldiers died in the war. Twice that number bore the scars of wounds, some so mutilated in body or mind as to be unfit for further work and unable to lead fulfilled lives.
Globally up to 20 million succumbed in the influenza epidemic which swept from Asia through Europe and on to America in 1918-1919. But the bereaved were not forgotten, because one of the purposes of mourning was to remember.