The First World War

by John Keegan

War’s rancours are quick to bite and slow to heal. By the end of 1914, four months after the outbreak of the Great War, 300,000 Frenchmen had been killed, 600,000 wounded, out of a male population of twenty million, perhaps ten million of military age. By the end of the war, nearly two million Frenchmen were dead, the majority from the infantry, the major arm of service, which had lost 22 per cent of those enlisted. The heaviest casualties had been suffered by the youngest year-groups: between 27 per cent and 30 per cent of the conscript classes of 1912–15.

The suffering of the German war generation was comparable. “Year groups 1892–1895, men who were between nineteen and twenty-two when the war broke out, were reduced by 35–37 per cent.” Overall, of the sixteen million born between 1870 and 1899, 13 per cent were killed, at the rate of 465,600 for each year the war lasted. The heaviest casualties, as in most armies, fell among the officers, of whom 23 per cent were killed—25 per cent of regular officers—as against 14 per cent of enlisted men.

In all, 2,057,000 Germans died in the war, or of wounds in its aftermath.

The First, unlike the Second World War, saw no systematic displacement of populations, no deliberate starvation, no expropriation, little massacre or atrocity. It was, despite the efforts by state propaganda machines to prove otherwise, and the cruelties of the battlefield apart, a curiously civilised war.

In 1939 the apprehension of war was strong, so was its menace, so, too, was knowledge of its reality. In 1914, by contrast, war came, out of a cloudless sky, to populations which knew almost nothing of it and had been raised to doubt that it could ever again trouble their continent.

Rising population—there was a 35 per cent increase in Austria-Hungary between 1880 and 1910, 43 per cent in Germany, 26 per cent in Britain, over 50 per cent in Russia—sharply enlarged the size of internal markets; emigration—twenty-six million people left Europe for the Americas and Australasia in 1880–1910—increased demand for goods there also, while the enormous expansion of overseas empires, formal and informal, in Africa and Asia, drew millions of their inhabitants into the international market, both as suppliers of staples and consumers of finished goods.

second revolution in transport—in 1893 steamship overtook sailing-ship tonnage for the first time—had greatly accelerated and expanded the movement of commerce overseas, while the extension of the railway network (virtually complete in Western Europe and the United States by 1870) in Eastern Europe and in Russia—where it grew in length from 31,000 to 71,000 kilometres between 1890 and 1913—added that enormous region, rich in cereals, minerals, oil and timber, to the integrated international economy.

The greater proportion passed through the City of London. Though its central banking reserve of gold was small—only £24 million in 1890, when the Bank of France had £95 million, the Reichsbank £40 million and the United States Federal Reserve £142 million—the worldwide connections of its private banks and discount houses, insurance and commodity companies and equity and produce exchanges made it nevertheless the principal medium of buying, selling and borrowing for all advanced countries.

It remained a weak concept, for its most important principle, established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, was that of the sovereignty of states, which left each in effect unfettered by anything but judgement of self-interest. The only area over which states had agreed to limit the operation of self-interest lay not on land but at sea, which the leading powers had agreed at Paris in 1856 should be one where neutrality was respected and private military activity outlawed.

The significance of improvised fortification—the entrenchments and earthworks thrown up at speed which, defended by riflemen, had caused such loss to the attacker on the Tugela and Modder rivers during the Boer War, in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War and at the lines of Chatalja during the Second Balkan War—had been noted, but discounted. Given enough well-led and well-motivated infantry, the European military theorists believed, no line of trenches could be held against them.

The result of this requirement was to produce enormous armies of serving and potential soldiers. In the German army, model for all others, a conscript spent the first two years of full adulthood in uniform, effectively imprisoned in barracks which were governed by distant officers and administered by sergeants all too close at hand. During the first five years after his discharge from duty he was obliged to return to the reserve unit of his regiment for annual training. Then, until the age of thirty-nine, he was enrolled in a unit of the secondary reserve, or Landwehr; thereafter, until the age of forty-five, in the third-line reserve, the Landsturm. There were French, Austrian and Russian equivalents. The effect was to maintain inside European civil society a second, submerged and normally invisible

military society, millions strong, of men who had shouldered a rifle, marched in step, borne the lash of a sergeant’s tongue and learnt to obey orders.

The forty-two active divisions, comprising 600,000 men, would on mobilisation take with them into the field another twenty-five reserve divisions and ancillary reserve units, raising the war strength of the army to over three million.

The division, a creation of the Napoleonic revolution in military affairs, normally comprised twelve battalions of infantry and twelve batteries of artillery, 12,000 rifles and seventy-two guns. Its firepower in attack was formidable. In a minute of activity, the division could discharge 120,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition—more if its twenty-four

machine guns joined in the action—and a thousand explosive shells, a weight of fire unimaginable by any commander in any previous period of warfare.

What had not been perceived is that firepower takes effect only if it can be directed in timely and accurate fashion. That requires communication. Undirected fire is wasted effort, unless observers can correct its fall, order shifts of target, signal success, terminate failure, co-ordinate the action of infantry with its artillery support.

All European armies in 1904 had long-laid military plans, notable in most cases for their inflexibility. None was integrated with what today would be called a “national security policy,” made in conclave between politicians, diplomats, intelligence directors and service chiefs, and designed to serve a country’s vital interests, for such a concept of national leadership did not then exist.

the median marching speed of trained troops was twenty kilometres a day.23 Orders to speed up or to switch roads could scarcely alter that. Then there was the well-known “diminishing power of the offensive”;

the great cities and the populous provinces of Belgium and north-western France must be occupied”;25 such duties were a sponge soaking up fighting troops.

Railways would position the troops for his great wheel; the Belgian and French roads would allow them to reach the outskirts of Paris in the sixth week from mobilisation day; but they would not arrive in the strength necessary to win a decisive battle unless they were accompanied by eight corps—200,000 men—for which there was no room. His plan for a lightning victory was flawed at its heart.

The provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, annexed to the new German Empire in 1871, had been heavily fortified by France in the two preceding centuries. Under German imperial government—Alsace-Lorraine was “Reich” territory, coming directly under the administration of Berlin—the fortifications of Metz and Thionville on the River Moselle and of Strasbourg on the Rhine had been expensively modernised. Those cities were the gateways from France to Germany. Schlieffen presumed that the French high command would shrink from planning to attack them.

The Conscription Law of 1905, imposing two years of military service on all young Frenchmen, without exemption, eased that difficulty by increasing the size of the “active” or peacetime army; the Law actually made the French peacetime army larger than that which Germany intended to deploy into Belgium, which brought the problem of reserves back again.

Plan XVII, which came into force in April 1913,

reversed his scheme. The amalgamation of reserve with active units was set aside. The deployment northwards to the sea was curtailed, leaving only the left-hand Fifth Army to deal with the danger of a German advance through northern Belgium from a position opposite southern Belgium. Most important, the operations on the common frontier were designed to be offensive. “Whatever the circumstances,” Plan XVII laid down, “the intention of the commander-in-chief is to advance with all forces united to the attack on the German armies”; that meant an attack into Lorraine, the “favour” Schlieffen doubted France would grant.

Another was the anxiety induced by Germany’s response to the French Two-Year Law of 1905; in 1911–13 it passed conscription laws of its own which sharply increased the size of its peacetime army.37 Those measures, and Germany’s known ability to deploy reserve formations at

mobilisation, put a premium on using the strength of the French peacetime army as forcefully as possible, before the reserves of either side could come into play.

France had responded to the German conscription laws of 1911–13 by another of her own, extending service to three years; this Three-Year Law of 1913, though it could not compensate for the growing preponderance of German armies over French, did increase the size of the French peacetime army, while automatically reducing that of the reserves, thus reinforcing the argument for immediate offensive action in war.

By 1911 there was between them a firm understanding that in the event of Germany’s violation of the Anglo-French-Prussian treaty of 1839 guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality, a British Expeditionary Force would take its place on the French left, an understanding which palliated, if it did not solve, “the Belgian problem.”

Like France, it would be slower than Germany to utilise its reserves in a crisis. Its initial operations would therefore also have to be mounted with the active army.

they were able to extract from General Zhilinsky, the Russian Chief of Staff, a promise that his army would attack Germany with at least 800,000 men—half its peacetime strength—“after M + 15,” fifteen days from mobilisation.

“Use them or lose them” became the imperative of missile strategy; for missiles not used in a crisis might become the debris of an opponent’s first strike: an army which did not strike as soon as time permitted might be destroyed in mid-mobilisation; even if it completed its mobilisation but then failed to attack, it would have shown its hand and lost the advantage the war plan had been so painstakingly devised to deliver.

Investigation swiftly revealed that, though the terrorists were all Austrian subjects, they had been armed in Serbia and smuggled back across the Austrian border by a Serbian nationalist organisation.

Whatever the truth, by 2 July three of the murder team had made a full confession; it disclosed that they had been supplied with weapons from a Serbian military arsenal and helped to cross the border by Serbian frontier guards. The information was sufficient to confirm Austria’s rooted belief in Serbian malevolence and to arouse its equally ready desire to punish the small kingdom for its disturbance of order within the empire.

The evidence of Serb complicity, official or not, in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, exposed by the conspirators’ confessions of 2 July, was therefore enough to persuade many in the imperial government that a war against Serbia was now a necessity.

Dare not Austria might; in retrospect it is tempting to surmise that, had she struck at once in anger, trumpeting dynastic wrath and righteous belief in Serbia’s guilt, Europe might have allowed her to mount positive measures without outside interference.

was Austria’s unwillingness to act unilaterally that transformed a local into a general European crisis and her unwillingness so to act must be explained in large part by the precautionary mood of thought which decades of contingent war planning had implanted in the mind of European governments.

The net of interlocking and opposed understandings and mutual assistance treaties—France to go to war on Russia’s side and vice versa if either were attacked by Germany, Britain to lend assistance to France if the vital interests of both were judged threatened, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy (the Triple Alliance) to go to war together if any one were attacked by two other states—is commonly held to have been the mechanism which brought the “Allies” (France, Russia and Britain) into conflict in 1914 with the “Central Powers” (Germany and Austria-Hungary). Legalistically that cannot be denied.

Austria had simply wanted to punish Serbia (though it had lacked the courage to act alone). Germany had wanted a diplomatic success that would leave its Austrian ally stronger in European eyes; it had not wanted war. The Russians had certainly not wanted war but had equally not calculated that support for Serbia would edge the danger of war forward.

Chancellor still believed that Austria and Russia could be brought to negotiate their mobilisations away, even if the Chief of the Great General Staff by then wanted a mobilisation of his own. France had not mobilised but was in growing fear that Germany would mobilise against her. Britain, which had awoken to the real danger of the crisis only on Saturday 25 July, still hoped on Thursday 30 July that the Russians would tolerate an Austrian punishment of Serbia but were determined not to leave France in the lurch.

That, by 31 July, was certainly the view of the French army. News, true or exaggerated, of German military preparations, had thrown even Joffre, “a byword for imperturbability,” into a state of anxiety. The loss of advantage was a fear that now afflicted him as acutely as it had

Janushkevich on 29 July and Moltke on 30 July. He foresaw the secret approach of German troops to their deployment positions while his own soldiers were still in barracks, German reservists kitting out at their depots while his were still at home.

It is absolutely necessary for the government to understand that, starting with this evening, any delay of twenty-four hours in calling up our reservists and issuing orders prescribing covering operations, will have as its result the withdrawal of our concentration points by from fifteen to twenty-five kilometres for each day of delay; in other words, the abandonment of just that much of our territory. The Commander-in-Chief must decline to accept this responsibility.

Moltke was aghast, explained that the paperwork would take a year, but was ordered to cancel the invasion of Luxembourg, which was the Schlieffen Plan’s necessary preliminary.

Precautionary measures had been taken; the fleet had been sent to war stations, France was even secretly assured that the Royal Navy would protect its Channel coast; but further than that the cabinet would not go. Then, on 2 August, Germany delivered the last of its ultimata, this time to Belgium, demanding the use of its territory in operations against France and threatening to treat the country as an enemy if she resisted. The ultimatum was to expire in twenty-four hours, on Monday 3 August.

The First World War had still not quite begun. The Austrians succeeded in delaying their declaration of war on Russia until 5 August and were still not at war with Britain and France a week later. Those two countries were driven to make up the Austrians’ mind for them by announcing hostilities on 12 August.

Horses, like men, were mustering in hundreds of thousands all over Europe in the first week of August. Even Britain’s little army called up 165,000, mounts for the cavalry and draught

animals for the artillery and regimental transport waggons. The Austrian army mobilised 600,000, the German 715,000, the Russian—with its twenty-four cavalry divisions—over a million.

Trains were to fill the memories of all who went to war in 1914. The railway section of the German Great General Staff timetabled the movement of 11,000 trains in the mobilisation period, and no less than 2,150 fifty-four-waggon trains crossed the Hohenzollern Bridge over the Rhine alone between 2 and 18 August.8 The chief French railway companies, Nord, Est, Ouest, PLM, POM, had since May 1912 had a plan to concentrate 7,000 trains for mobilisation. Many had moved near the entraining centres before war began.

Long prepared, many of the frontier stations were sleepy village halts, where platforms three-quarters of a mile long had not justified the trickle of peacetime comings and goings. Images of those journeys are among the strongest to come down to us from the first two weeks of August 1914: the chalk scrawls on the waggon sides—“Ausflug nach Paris,” and “à Berlin”—the eager young

The heavy cavalry wore brass helmets with a long horsehair plume, the light cavalry frogged jackets and scarlet trousers; some of the heavy cavalry were burdened with breastplates unchanged in pattern from Waterloo. The light cavalry of the Armée d’Afrique were dressed in sky-blue tunics, the Spahis in flowing red cloaks, the Zouaves in baggy red breeches and Turkish waistcoats. Most conspicuous of all, because of their numbers, were the infantry of the metropolitan army. Under long, turned-back blue greatcoats, their legs were encased in madder-red trousers tucked into calf-length boots.14 All was made of heavy wool; the stifling weight of antique uniforms was to prove one of the additional ordeals of combat in the sun-drenched autumn of 1914.