The First World War

by Hew Strachan

First, they had to mobilise as fast as the Germans, avoiding the chaos into

which their army had been thrown by mobilisation in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. They managed it so well that in 1914 they mobilised ahead of the Germans. Second, they had to deploy their forces to allow them to concentrate to either north or east, depending on where the main weight of the German attack came. Plan 17, the final version of France’s war plan, posted ten corps on the eastern frontier and five on the Belgian, with a further six behind Verdun ready to go in either direction. Formally speaking, Plan 17 made no provision for the British Expeditionary Force, but in the years before the war the expectation had developed that its two corps would be added to and extend the French front facing Belgium. The third task was to provide for advance guards to make contact with the enemy and identify the thrust of the attack. This was where things came unstuck. On 1 August France mobilised in support of its Russian ally, and on 3 August Germany declared war on France. Three days later Sordet’s cavalry corps set off into Belgium, following the line of the Meuse to within nine miles of Liege. It covered nearly forty miles a day, giving the horses no rest on the metalled roads, and getting through 15,000 horseshoes by 10 August. The cavalry continued the hectic pace over the next five days, ranging through the Ardennes and as far west as Charleroi. Sordet found no evidence that the Germans had come west of the Meuse. Joffre’s expectations

that the Germans lacked the strength to make more than a limited incursion into Belgium, that they would stay eas...

Legally Britain was under no obligation to act. But the threat to Belgium fused British strategic self-interest with liberal morality. It united the government and it rallied the nation. Britain responded with an ultimatum of its own, demanding that Germany respect Belgian neutrality. It expired at midnight on 4 August.

In theory all remaining able-bodied males were liable for service in the Garde Civique. In reality only those who resided in towns and fortified places were active and possessed the Garde Civique’s rather unmilitary uniforms: in 1913 it had 46,000 members. In the enthusiasm of early August 1914 about another 100,000 joined the non-active Garde Civique based in rural areas.

The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 had attempted to codify the laws of war. They had recognised the rights of an invaded people to rise up in resistance, provided they formed themselves in organised bodies and were identifiable as belligerents.

Their field service regulations published the relevant articles of the Hague convention in an appendix, but the body of the text made clear that the general staff did not recognise the right of civilians to resist invasion.

But the German army killed 5,521 civilians in Belgium and 896 in France.

Kluck’s army had 84,000 horses and much of its supply effort was devoted to the fodder - 2 million lbs a day - needed to feed them. Most of the transport formations were newly formed on mobilisation, with both men and horses new to the rigours and demands of military supply in war.

Discipline was on a knife-edge. But the killing of civilians was not the product simply of alarmed and nervous reservists losing control. It was condoned and promoted from above. Conscious of both the need for speed and the threat of insurrection in their rear, army and corps commanders endorsed repression of imagined civilian resistance.

In all, 674 civilians were killed in Dinant by the Saxons on the orders of their corps commander. Conceived as a pre-emptive strike against anticipated franc-tireur activity, the massacre was justified by German claims that they had indeed been fired upon. The shots probably came from French soldiers on the other bank of the Meuse.

had been decided on 5 August that the BEF should go to France, but initially it deployed only five divisions, or about 100,000 men, the largest body that the diminutive professional British army could put into the field.

The ‘battles of the frontiers’ were the first occasion on which most French, German and British soldiers came face to face with modern firepower, and they were devastated and disorientated by the effects.

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.

The French army’s use of summary justice was more severe at this than at any other stage of the war. On 1 September the Ministry of War instructed the army to carry out death sentences within twenty-four hours. Soldiers were executed without trial. Joffre emphasised that requests for clemency were to be exceptional

France executed about 600 soldiers in the First World War, and the majority were shot in the first year of the war. The British pattern was similar to the French. They executed 346 soldiers between 1914 and 1920,

Joffre asserted his authority. By 6 September he had purged his army of fifty-eight generals who had failed to meet the demands of war. But there were tactical solutions as well. His instructions repeatedly insisted that infantry attacks should not be launched from too great a distance or prematurely. He emphasised the role of the artillery, not only in support of the attack but also in its preparation. Backed by their 75mms, the French infantry dug

On 6 September the sector from Verdun to Switzerland, 280 km, was already stable; by the 9th the sector from Verdun to Mailly, another 100 km, was also fixed. On that day only the 105 km from Mailly to La Ferté-sous-Jouarre was really fluid; the rest was dominated by a dogged defensive battle.

On 5 September the French had 465,000 75mm shells in reserve; by the 10th the reserves had slumped to 33,000. Free to choose their ground, the French gunners had good fields of fire. Employing delayed-action fuses for ricochet fire, a 75mm battery was able to sweep an area of 4 hectares, 400 metres deep, in 40 to 50 seconds. Its four guns, firing ten rounds of shrapnel a minute, discharged 10,000 balls. This was far more effective against advancing infantry than machine-guns.

But the right wing was not strong enough. It had detached forces to carry on operations to its rear - especially around Antwerp, behind whose fortifications the bulk of the Belgian army had withdrawn - and it had to occupy conquered territory. The army as a whole had lost 265,000 men killed, wounded and missing by 6 September. Meanwhile the French, holding their positions in the east defensively, were able to redeploy troops to the west, using their own railway system. On 23 August the 24.5 divisions of the three armies of the German right wing faced 17.5 allied divisions. But between 27 August and 2 September an average of thirty-two trains travelled westwards every twenty-four hours. Joffre created a new army, the 6th, around Paris and outside the German envelopment. By 6 September the German right wing confronted a total of forty-one allied divisions.

On 4 September the French realised

thanks not least to the use of aircraft for reconnaissance purposes - that the moment for a counter-stroke had arrived.

On 6 September the allies’ retreat ended as they turned to attack. Kluck remained focused on his battle with the 6th Army, and so in Bulow’s mind the threat from the BEF was primarily to his right flank, not Kluck’s left. On 8 September he pulled back his exposed right wing, reorientating his army more on a north-south line - and thus widened the gap.

Bülow had already decided that the 1st and 2nd Armies should retreat on converging lines. Whereas he was preoccupied with the dangers presented by an enemy breakthrough, Kluck was focused on the opportunities for victory presented by envelopment : the one was the obverse of the other, since Kluck’s pursuit of envelopment was what opened the opportunities for an allied breakthrough. When Hentsch at last arrived at Kluck’s headquarters after a five-hour drive on crowded roads on the morning of the 9th, Kluck himself was out of contact, pushing the attack on the French 6th Army. Hentsch and Kluck’s chief of staff therefore took the responsibility for ordering the 1st Army’s retreat. Kluck liked to maintain that he was on the verge of defeating the 6th army, but such an argument leaves out of account any effects that the BEF’s advance would have had as it hit his army on its left and rear. The Germans fell back to the heights overlooking the Aisne valley, where they entrenched.

First, it had overrun almost all Belgium as well as the industrial heartlands of north-eastern France, including 74 per cent of its coal production and 81 per cent 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.

This was a great war because it was a war fought over big ideas. What had begun in the Balkans and had been originally driven by issues of ethnicity and nationalism was now clothed with principles whose force lay precisely in their claims to universality. In due course these ideologies became the basis of propaganda, but that could only happen because they expressed convictions with which the belligerent populations could identify. They were deemed to be so fundamental that they sustained the war despite both its length and its intensity. The peoples of Europe fought the First World War because they believed in - or at least accepted - the causes for which their nations stood. It was emphatically not a war without purpose.

Between 1910 and 1914 Russia increased the number of trains it could send westward from 250 a day to 360, but by the fifteenth day of the war only half the infantry was mobilised and no more than twenty-seven out of 114 divisions were concentrated.

But these were the first armies to benefit from the use of antiseptics, from mass inoculation programmes, and from an understanding of bacteriology. In wars before that of 1914-18 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.

To speak of the horror of the trenches is to substitute hyperbole for common sense: the war would have been far more horrific if there had been no trenches. They protected flesh and blood from the worst effects of the firepower revolution of the late nineteenth century.

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 238,000

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. The big ‘pushes’ of positional war caused death rates to rise, but, provided those offensives were carefully prepared and well supported with artillery, the attackers’ casualties were frequently comparable with the defenders’. Broadly speaking this was true for both the major battles of 1916, Verdun and the Somme, and the Germans lost more men defending on the Somme than they had attacking at Verdun earlier in the year. In August 1917, at the height of the third battle of Ypres, the epitome of trench warfare’s waste and futility for many commentators, British casualties on the western front totalled 81,080. Exactly a year later, when the British army inflicted a major defeat on the Germans at Amiens and began its advance to victory, they soared to 122,272.

When Falkenhayn ordered the adoption of defensive positions on the western front at the end of November 1914 he saw them as a means to an end: tactically to confer on his troops the benefits of the defensive, and strategically to enable him to manoeuvre elsewhere.

They prevented the loss of the skills of mobile warfare; they asserted the dominance of one side over no man’s land; and they might bring back valuable intelligence. This was a form of fighting which relied on stealth and surprise, which bypassed long-range fire, and instead required the weapons of an older generation, not only grenades and bombs but also picks and shovels. However, as raids, too, became institutionalised, so they grew in scale and elaboration, ‘a battle in miniature with all the preliminaries and accompaniments magnified’.

Artillery was the key weapon of trench warfare. Envelopment, the leading operational idea of staffs before the war, still found its proponents in the east, but in the west there were no exposed flanks. The task that confronted the French and British armies, committed to the recovery of the lost territory of northern France and to the liberation of Belgium, was that of breaking into and through the German positions.

In mobile war the constraint on the use of artillery was the supply problems of batteries in the field - not only in terms of shells for the guns but also of fodder for the horses.

Static war minimised the logistical constraints, especially as light railways replaced horse-drawn transport, but increased the numbers of targets. The first consequence of the generals’ responses to trench war was pressure not on their supply services but on home production.

IIowever, the fact that shell production rose in 1915, and did so for all the belligerents regardless of political complexion, confirms that the phenomenon of shell shortage had some common characteristics.

First was the issue of raw materials. It was particularly acute for Germany, whose imports from overseas were cut off by the allied blockade.

More pressing for the French and British than the issue of raw materials was that of labour. Conscription had mobilised skilled workers in the munitions industries but also enabled their return.

By June 1916 the French army had released 287,000 men back to the arms industries.

In 1914 employees of the major arms firms had responded with disproportionate enthusiasm to the call for volunteers for the army. By June 1915 even those firms already engaged in arms

production before the war were short of 14,000 skilled workers, and plant was lying idle for lack of hands to use

One solution to the manpower needs of the munitions factories was to ‘dilute’ labour, to replace skilled workers with unskilled. The greater use of automated processes and the division of production into a large number of distinct, but repetitive, operations permitted such a switch. The principal job of the skilled work...

On 5 March 1915 Lloyd George persuaded both employers and trade unions to accept dilution, but only for the duration of the war and only in the production of munitions.

1914 7.7 million French women already had jobs, and they made up 32 per cent of the total workforce; by the war’s end they accounted for 40 per cent of the workforce. In Britain women workers rose from just under 6 million, or 26 per cent of the workforce, to just over 7.3 million, or 36 per cent, in the same period. In Germany the number of females in insured employment expanded so quickly in the two decades before the war that the increase during the war, from about 3.5 million to just over 4 million, represented a decline in the rate of growth.

Germany makes very evident the pattern that prevailed elsewhere, too: that those

who entered munitions production did so from other occupations; the war caused working-class women to change jobs more than i...

The British metal and chemical industries and the government factories employed a total of 212,000 women in July 1914, and 923,000 by July 1918. Before the war 17,731 French women worked in the metal industries, but 425,000 at its end.

The rapid expansion of munitions output and the equally dramatic shift in how that production was carried out had long-term benefits for battlefield performance, but could only

be achieved quickly by the lowering of standards ove...