The First World War

by John Keegan

stop work at once. I have a great respect for your English dead”—

Yet it damaged civilisation, the rational and liberal civilisation of the European enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage done, world civilisation also. Pre-war Europe, imperial though it was in its relations with most of the world beyond the continent, offered respect to the principles of constitutionalism, the rule of law and representative government. Post-war Europe rapidly relinquished confidence in such principles.

Totalitarianism was the political continuation of war by other means.

It was their preaching of social revolution that had driven governments, particularly Bismarck’s in Germany after 1871, to enact labour welfare laws as a measure of self-protection.

International, which chiefly meant European, policy was indeed, in the opening years of the twentieth century, guided not by the search for a secure means of averting conflict but by the age-old quest for security in military superiority.

It was on numbers of infantrymen, equipped with the new magazine-rifle, trained in close-order tactics and taught, above all, to accept that casualties would be heavy until a decision was gained that, nevertheless, the generals counted upon to achieve victory.

The current belief in the power of the offensive was correct; whoever first brought his available firepower into action with effect would prevail. What had not been perceived is that firepower takes effect only if it can be directed in timely and accurate fashion.

In the event, the states of Europe proceeded, as if in a dead march and a dialogue of the deaf, to the destruction of their continent and its civilisation.

the commanders of the British army going to the Crimea chose their executives by the immemorial method of nominating friends and favourites.

M-Tag (mobilisation day), as the Germans called it, became a neurotic fixed point. From it, inflexible calculation prescribed how many troops could be carried at what speed to any chosen border zone, what quantity of supplies could follow and how broad would be the front on which armies could be deployed on a subsequent date against the enemy.

every day’s delay in proclaiming general mobilisation entailed, as if by a law of nature, the surrender of twenty-five kilometres’ depth of national territory to the enemy;

“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.

The existence of a permanent medium of negotiation between the European powers might have robbed the war plans that lay in their pigeonholes of their menacing instantaneity;

It was as if, sixty years later, the United States Strategic Air Command had enjoyed the freedom to write plans for nuclear war against Russia without reference to the State Department, Navy or Army and to leave the President to circulate within government such details of it as he saw fit.

Legalistically that cannot be denied. It was no treaty, however, that caused Austria to go running to Berlin for guidance and support in the aftermath of the Sarajevo assassination—no treaty in any case applied—but anticipation of the military consequences that might ensue should she act alone.

In short, it was the calculation of presumed military response, of how it was guessed one military precaution would follow from another, that drove Austria to seek comfort in the Triple Alliance from the outset, not the Triple Alliance that set military events in train.

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.29

Note from Joffre

The Serbs, cause of the crisis in the first place, had been forgotten. War was not to come to their little kingdom for another fourteen months.

The French piled everything into a mountainous pyramid, “le chargement de campagne,” crowned with the individual’s metal cooking pot; gleams of sunlight from such pots would allow young Lieutenant Rommel to identify and kill French soldiers in high standing corn on the French frontier later that August.

This, the only truly regular element of the French army, was composed of white regiments which in peacetime garrisoned the empire in North and West Africa and Indo-China. Its soldiers were hardened and experienced veterans. That was to be their undoing.

Twenty days of campaigning seemed to have aged the soldiers as many years.”

The events of 8 September prompted Foch to draft the later legendary signal: “My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.”

while the British cavalry took pride in avoiding entrenchment exercises, and the French disregarded “the most demanding notions of cover,”

Foch, acting as Joffre’s deputy on the critical front, issued the celebrated order, “No retirement. Every man to the battle.”

Finding a means to be alone for a few moments, he shot himself. His body was later recovered, and buried on the family estate. It was a kinder ending than that met by so many of his soldiers, who died anonymously in the undergrowth of the Prussian forests, untended in their last hours, undiscovered in death. Their bones lie there to this day and the news of their passing was communicated to their families only by the expiry of hope.

Death of Sasonov

Bulgakov’s XX Corps found itself penned into an increasingly constricted sector of the Augustow forest, by attacks so fierce that a principal casualty was the surviving stock of auroch, Europe’s last wild bison.

The “Race to the Sea” is thus best understood as a series of stalemated collisions along the successive rungs of a ladder whose uprights were formed by those vital parallel railways.

In this seesaw, functional and structural weaknesses disfavoured first one side, then the other, to the eventual frustration of all effort to break through to open country or break back to the original line of defence. The physical product of offence and counter-offence was an ever thicker and more confused trench line, resembling a layer of scar tissue, picked at and irritated, over the site of an unsuccessful surgical operation.

That was not quite the end of Emden’s remarkable cruise. The commander of the landing party on Direction Island evaded the Australians, appropriated a schooner, sailed it to the Dutch East Indies, got passage aboard a German steamer to Yemen in Arabia, fought off Bedouin attacks, reached the Hejaz railway built to bring pilgrims to Mecca and eventually arrived to a justifiably extravagant welcome in Constantinople in June 1915.

In 1914 he converted Churchill, equally undiscriminating if a strategic project were grand enough,

and those mainly Pathans of the North-West Frontier, natural rebels who “would probably be sniping at British troops within a year or two of going on pension and at home in their tribe … [they] owed allegiance to no man, living in an anarchic paradise ruled by the bullet and the blood feud.”

for Britain regarded the Gulf and its coastline as a British lake.

Someone writing a history of the 21st century with replace British with American

The stories of Russian infantrymen waiting unarmed to inherit the rifle of another killed or wounded were not tittle-tattle; they were nothing less than the truth.

the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force intelligence service was deficient not only of information about Turkish strength and dispositions but even lacked maps of the area to be assaulted. It was believed, for example, that the ground behind Cape Helles, in fact broken by numerous gullies, formed “a … uniform and [un]accidented slope.”

The 29th Division had lost its strength twice over, while the New Zealanders, of whom 8,566 served on the peninsula, recorded 14,720 casualties, including wounded who returned two or three times.

Few British make the journey; those who do, and find their way to ANZAC’s tiny and terrible battlegrounds at Lone Pine, Russell’s Top and Steele’s Post, never fail to be moved by the appearance of young Australians, men and women, who have trekked across Europe to see where their grandfathers and great-grandfathers fought and often died.

“with the great harbour of Scapa Flow in the North and the narrow straits of Dover in the south, there is no doubt, Sir, that we are God’s chosen people.”

Had it fallen the results might have been beneficial to the French conduct of the war, for it was indeed a death trap, while the broken and wooded terrain to its rear was perfectly defensible at a cost in life much lower than the French were to suffer in and around the sacrificial city in the months to

verdun

Augustin Cochin, spent from 9–14 April in the Mort Homme trenches without seeing a single German, “the last two days soaked in icy mud, under terrible bombardment, without any shelter other than the narrowness of the trench … The Boche did not attack, naturally, it would have been too stupid … result: I arrived there with 175 men, I returned with 34, several half mad … not replying any more when I spoke to them.”

French defence faltered before an attack by the Alpenkorps, an élite mountain division of Bavarian guard and German light infantry; among the light infantry officers was Lieutenant Paulus, the future commander of Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

“Horribly sad and very pathetic to see how good and cheery and patient the dear fellows are … I hate it all so! … such horrible sadness and depression.”41 French was not made for modern war or for the politics of a national conflict.

The successful generals of the First World War, those who did not crack outright or decline gradually into pessimism, were a hard lot, as they had to be with the casualty figures accumulating on their desks.

Haig, in whose public manner and private diaries no concern for human suffering was or is discernible, compensated for his aloofness with nothing whatsoever of the common touch.

A new generation of young military historians has taken to re-fighting the battles of the British Expeditionary Force with a passion more understandable in survivors of the trench warfare disasters than in posthumous academic analysts.

The basic and stark fact, nevertheless, was that the conditions of warfare between 1914 and 1918 predisposed towards slaughter

A young British officer, Gerald Brenan, crossing subsequently captured ground in the fourth week of July, found the bodies of soldiers wounded on 1 July who had “crawled into shell holes, wrapped their waterproof sheets round them, taken out their bibles and died like that.”

To the British, it was and would remain their greatest military tragedy of the twentieth century, indeed of their national military history.

The Somme marked the end of an age of vital optimism in British life that has never been recovered.

by the spring of 1916 was planning to settle much of the Baltic States with Germans, who would take the land of the expropriated inhabitants. They did not include the Jews who, being often German-speakers, were regarded as useful instruments of occupation policy.

The solution, he had concluded, was to attack on a wide front, thus depriving the enemy of the chance to mass reserves at a predeterminably critical point, to protect the assaulting infantry in deep dugouts while they were waiting to jump off, and to advance the line as near as possible to the Austrian, by digging saps forward as close as seventy-five yards to the enemy trenches. These were great improvements.

Brusilov was one of the few generals in WW1 that was an actually creative strategic thinker