The First World War

by Hew Strachan

This is of course the biggest paradox in our understanding of the war. On the one hand it was an unnecessary war fought in a manner that defied common sense, but on the other it was the war that shaped the world in which we still live.

The First World War solved some problems and created others; in doing so it was little different from any other war. The other major English-language work published on the eightieth anniversary of the armistice, John Keegan’s The First World War, concluded that ‘principle . . . scarcely merited the price eventually paid for its protection’.

But is it really more true of the First World War than of any other war? And what do principles represent, if in the last resort they are not worth fighting for? We may wonder why the belligerents of 1914 were ready to endure so much, but we do so from the perspective of a new century and possessed of values that have themselves been shaped by the experience both of the First World War and of later wars. It behoves us to think as they did then, not as we do now.

By then Austria-Hungary and Serbia were at war. At 6 p.m. on 23 July, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Serbia delivered an ultimatum, demanding that the Serb government take steps to extirpate terrorist organisations operating from within its frontiers, that it suppress anti-Austrian propaganda, and that it accept Austro-Hungarian representation on its own internal inquiry into the assassinations. The Austro-Hungarian government set a deadline of forty-eight hours for Serbia’s reply, but the ambassador had packed his bags before it had expired.

Militarily Serbia had been weakened by the two Balkan wars, which had depleted the army’s munitions stocks and inflicted 91,000 casualties. Although its first-line strength on mobilisation rose to 350,000 men, there were only enough up-to-date rifles (ironically, German Mausers) for the peacetime strength of 180,000, and in some infantry units a third of the men had no rifles at all.

On the afternoon of 25 July he ordered the army to mobilise.

But it was not the first power in the July crisis to do so. On receipt of the ultimatum, Prince Alexander of Serbia immediately appealed to the Tsar of Russia. The Russian council of ministers met on the following day, 24 July. Sergey Sazonov, Russia’s foreign minister and a career diplomat, ‘a man of simple thought’ and an anglophile,11 said that Germany was using the crisis as a pretext for launching a preventive war.

The council approved orders for four military districts to prepare for mobilisation.

The pace of events was such that there was no time to clarify the distinction between warning and intent.

First, it assumed that the Germans would be sufficiently free from the campaign in France to despatch reinforcements to the east in a matter of weeks. To keep Conrad quiet Moltke suggested three to four weeks would be needed to defeat the French, and ten days to redeploy to the east, although these were not the planning assumptions of the German general staff. Second, no joint operational studies were conducted by the two armies in advance of hostilities. By 1913 and 1914 Moltke was more cautious in his promises to Conrad, but the latter did not hear him: each was reassured by the thought that the other would take the major burden against Russia. And, third, the idea took no account of the transformation effected in the capabilities and intentions of the Russian army in the intervening five years.

Conrad had assumed that it would take Russia thirty days to mobilise, but in February 1914 Moltke warned him (accurately enough) that two-thirds of the Russian army would be

mobilised by the eight...

would be stationed in their recruiting areas and would mobilise by incorporating the reservists from those areas. This was exactly the model adopted in Germany and France. But its effect — given Russia’s geographical configuration in the west — would be to forfeit its defence of Poland. There would be nothing for the Austro-German scheme of envelopment to envelop.

He reckoned that he needed eight divisions to hold the Austro-Serb frontier but twenty divisions to invade and defeat Serbia. This left a minimum of twenty-eight divisions to face the Russians in Galicia. He therefore created a reserve of twelve divisions which could go either to Serbia and be added to the eight already holding the frontier, or to Galicia if Russia supported Serbia and so increase the force there to forty divisions. This reserve, the 2nd Army, would not be mobilised and deployed in Galicia until between the twenty-first and

twenty-fifth days of mobilisation.

The difficulty inherent in the whole conception was that Austrian railway construction over the previous three decades had been predicated on a deployment to east and south. If the 2nd Army were shifted from Serbia to Galicia, the railway communications would place it on the Austrian right, not on the left.

On 25 July Franz Josef ordered mobilisation against Serbia only, to begin on 28 July. On that day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The guns mounted in the fortress of Semlin fired across the Danube, and from the river itself monitors of the Austro-Hungarian navy lobbed shells into the Serb capital. The hospital was hit.

What enthused the Viennese crowds was the promise of a quick victory over Serbia; what restrained them was the fear of a great European war. Their wishful thinking reflected Conrad’s: this was to be the Third Balkan War, not the First World War.

On 28 July the Tsar responded to this Balkan crisis as Russia had responded to earlier ones: with the mobilisation of the four military districts facing Galicia. But this was nonsensical both to the military, since the reorganisation of the army meant that each district drew on the resources of others, and to Sazonov, who remained convinced that Germany — not Austria-Hungary - was the real danger.

On 30 July the Russian army was ordered to proceed to general mobilisation.

1 August, the day on which Germany declared war on Russia,

By postponing the commencement of mobilisation against Russia until 4 August, Conrad still ensured that the 2nd Army would arrive in Galicia within twenty-four days of mobilisation, on 28 August.

Moreover, the 2nd Army was so mishandled as to be valueless in both Serbia and Galicia.

The military operations of the First World War began with defeats of Austria-Hungary so shattering that the empire would indeed have collapsed there and then but for the support of its ally.

The Austrians were down to 290,000 men in the region, many of them garrison troops, while the Serbs mustered 350,000. For all their problems of recovery after the first two Balkan wars, the Serb army had recent combat experience, and they had French 75mm quick-firing field guns as well as better field howitzers.

By the end of 1914 stalemate had therefore set in on both Austria-Hungary’s fronts. It had effectively lost the Third Balkan War that it — and Conrad in particular — had so ardently pursued. Within four months Austria-Hungary’s casualties totalled 957,000, more than twice the army’s pre-war strength.

But in practice Austria-Hungary could not on its own sustain the two fronts for which it was responsible, and therefore the Germans would have to provide help. The humiliation implicit in this dependence meant that Vienna could never show the gratitude to which Germany felt it was entitled. Germany, for its part, concluded that it was ‘shackled to a corpse’.

At this stage of the war, opinion at home could be largely taken for granted. The war was justified because it was interpreted as a war of national self-defence. Before the war socialists had threatened to oppose war and disrupt mobilisation. However, the war they had vilified was a tool of imperialism and conquest. In 1914 every belligerent on the continent of Europe portrayed itself as the subject of direct attack. The working-class populations of all the powers may not have welcomed the war but they did not reject the duties and obligations

it imposed.

The paradox was this: Austria-Hungary, not Germany, was the power that at the beginning of July 1914 planned to use war as an instrument of policy. Admittedly, the conflict it sought was designed to be short, localised and fought between single powers, whereas the war that resulted was none of those things. For this Germany was blamed, both then and since.

When Britain and France confronted each other in Africa they did not resort to war. Indeed, the original purpose of the Anglo-French Entente of 1904 was not to create a united front against Germany, but to settle the two powers’ long-standing imperial rivalries in North Africa.

He had little interest in Morocco but he was anxious to disrupt the Anglo-French Entente. Germany’s heavy-handedness had precisely the opposite effect.

This, the first of two crises over Morocco, showed that regional rivalries could no longer be handled by diplomats in a self-contained fashion, but were liable to be both ‘Europeanised’ and ’militarised‘.

Weltpolitik was not a policy to use war for the fulfilment of German objectives; it did not make Germany responsible for the outbreak of the First World War. But it did challenge the status quo in three ways: colonial, naval and economic.

In 1870 Britain, with 32 per cent 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 35.3 per cent of the world’s manufacturing capacity, and Germany with 15.9 per cent: Britain now had 14.7 per cent. But Britain was still the dominant power in the world’s banking, insurance and shipping markets. Its invisible exports therefore compensated for its relative decline in the manufacturing sector.

The key need of Weltpolitik, therefore, was to open world markets to German products. This was an aim which an open door in world trade would secure — an objective favoured by Britain’s own historical commitment to free trade. As those engaged in commerce in both Britain and Germany recognised, war would only disrupt this growth and limit

Despite its title Weltpolitik also carried a domestic and internal purpose. 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. Weltpolitik was Bülow’s solution to this problem — an effort to use foreign policy to appeal to different constituencies within Germany. But the funding of the navy undermined the internal coalition on which Bülow relied. He planned to increase inheritance tax to pay for warships but this challenged the interests of conservative landowners. The conservatives and the Catholic Centre Party crushed the proposal in favour of a tax on mobile capital, which of course struck at business and urban interests. Confronted with domestic discord, Bethmann Hollweg, Bülow’s successor as chancellor, therefore abandoned Weltpolitik and attempted to curb naval spending. He aimed at detente with Britain, using the idea of an Anglo-German naval agreement to do so. This, too, was not without domestic problems, as both Tirpitz and the Kaiser were bound to oppose him. But it might appease the socialists, who became the largest single party in the Reichstag in the 1912 elections.

This was the subtext of the proposed Anglo-German naval agreement: what the Germans wanted in exchange for a limit on warship construction was Britain’s neutrality in relation to Europe. Britain rejected the proposal not only because the trade-off was unequal but also because its strategic interests bound it to the Entente. It could not afford to reopen rivalries outside Europe. Its need to neutralise the Low Countries, in order to leave the main sea route from London to the wider world unfettered, bound it to maintain the balance of power within Europe: geography and economic necessity determined that it would back the weaker power against the stronger on the Continental seaboard.

Britain saw both the defence of its maritime supremacy and its alliances as matters of vital national interest.

The first, with Japan, relieved it of naval responsibilities in the Pacific and gave it a counterweight to its principal Asiatic rival, Russia. The second, the 1904 entente with France, effectively allocated the eastern end of North Africa (including the Suez Canal, the all-important link to the Far East) to Britain. And the third, in 1907, promised to lessen the rivalry with its most persistent challenger in the Near East and Central Asia, Russia.

combination, these alliances both secured the heart of the empire, India, and protected the routes to it.

in 1912 the two navies divided responsibilities, with the French taking on the Mediterranean and the British the North Sea and the Channel.

These tensions - colonial, naval and coalition - were the underpinnings of the crisis in July 1914. But none of them in any direct sense related to the Balkans or to Austria-Hungary.

The principal link between the long-term and short-term origins of the First World War is the First Balkan War. The Germans saw it as a war fought by Russia by proxy, and on 2 December 1912 Bethmann Hollweg announced in the Reichstag that, if Austria-Hungary was attacked by a third party while pursuing its interests, Germany would support Austria-Hungary and fight to maintain its own position in Europe. Britain responded on the following day: it feared that a Russo-Austrian War would lead to a German attack on France and warned the Germans that if that happened it would not accept a French defeat. The Kaiser was furious, and summoned a meeting of his military and naval chiefs on 8 December. He said that, if Russia came to Serbia’s aid, Germany would fight. He assumed that in such a war Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Turkey would all side with the Triple Alliance, and take the main role against Serbia, so leaving Austria-Hungary to concentrate against Russia.

They marked the inauguration of a land arms race. In the first decade of the twentieth century the budgets of European armies were too taken up with the procurement of quick-firing field artillery to allow room for expansion; that changed in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The increases in the German army were driven by its size in comparison with those of its neighbours, France and Russia, not by some notion that the German army itself would be deployed to the Balkans. Cooperation between Germany’s general staff and Austria-Hungary’s remained as rudimentary as it had been before the crisis, and certainly inferior to that between Britain and France, and France and Russia. The crisis therefore revealed how the Balkans might become a flashpoint for wider European tensions.

own people, even if we are victorious’.5 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.

In 1911 it therefore conscripted 83 per cent of its eligible adult males, to Germany’s 57 per cent, and in 1913 it extended its period of regular service from two years to three.

When war broke out the Entente could put 182 divisions into the field against 136 of the two Central Powers.

Repington’s charge is one more frequently directed at the French army. But all armies in the decade before the First World War confronted the problem of how to mount an attack across a fire-swept battlefield. It was not sufficient to say that the defensive was the stronger form of warfare - nor was it necessarily true, as the First World War was itself to show. To win, an army had eventually to attack. The general solution was for the attacking troops to approach under cover, to close by breaking into small groups, advancing in bounds, and then to build

up fire superiority before the final rush. It was this last and most difficult phase that dominated so much military thought before 1914, as well as generating a great deal of wishful thinking. If an attacker could not believe that he was going to be successful, he was unlikely to have the resolve and determination to advance under fire. Good morale and the will to win were essential attributes of infantry soldiers, not the semi-mystical incantations of military theorists blind to the effects of the transformation of firepower.