The First World War

by John Keegan

The flaw in the provision for an International Court was that its convening was to be voluntary.

What uniformly characterised all these disputes was that none was submitted to the process of international arbitration suggested by the discussions at the Hague in 1899. When issues of potential conflict arose, as they did over the first (1905) and second (1911) Moroccan crises in Franco-German relations, turning on German resentment of the extension of French influence in North Africa, and over the First (1912) and Second (1913) Balkan Wars, the results of which disfavoured Austria, Germany’s ally, the great powers involved made no effort to invoke the Hague provision for international arbitration but settled affairs, as was traditional, by ad hoc international treaty.

The French army, with a mobilised strength of two million, had suffered by far the worst. Its losses in September, killed, wounded, missing and prisoners, exceeded 200,000, in October 80,000 and in November 70,000; the August losses, never officially revealed, may have exceeded 160,000. Fatalities reached the extraordinary total of 306,000, representing a tenfold increase in normal mortality among those aged between twenty and thirty; 45,000 of those under twenty had died, 92,000 of those between twenty and twenty-four, 70,000 of those between twenty-five and twenty-nine.140 Among those in their thirties, the death toll exceeded 80,000. All deaths had fallen on a male population of twenty million and more particularly on the ten million of military age. Germany had lost 241,000, including 99,000 in the 20–24 age group, out of a male population of thirty-two million.141

It was accepted that high levels of firepower entailed high casualty rates; it was still believed that a determination to accept heavy casualties would bring victory.49

Wellington had seen every episode of the battle with his own eyes and precisely directed its stages. Haig had not even been a spectator. He had seen nothing, heard nothing, except the distant roar of the bombardments and barrage, and done nothing. There was nothing for him to do, any more than there was anything for him to see; even one of his most junior subordinate commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Rickman, saw no more of his Accrington Pals once they had entered the German trenches than “sun glinting on their triangles,” the metal plates fixed to their packs as an identification mark. The iron curtain of war had descended between all commanders, low and high alike, and their men, cutting them off from each other as if they had been on different continents.

Lvov had a high-minded but hopelessly unrealistic belief in the capacity of “the people” to settle the direction of their own future.

The Russian army had disappeared, its soldiers, in Lenin’s memorable phrase, having “voted for peace with their feet.”

in a state where the landowners who should have supplied officers were principally concerned to wring the last ounce of rent or labour from the poor or landless peasants who supplied the rank and file, there could be no willingness to lay down life.

It may have been, as the Italian Commander-in-Chief, General Luigi Cadorna, believed, that the social frailty of his army required punishments for infractions of duty of a severity not known in the German army or the BEF: summary execution and the choosing of victims by lot.70 Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the British or Germans would have stood for such “normal persuasion” and it is a tribute to Italy’s sorely tried and dumbly uncomplaining peasant infantrymen that they did.