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Nevertheless, the Brusilov offensive was, on the scale by which success was measured in the foot-by-foot fighting of the First World War, the greatest victory seen on any front since the trench lines had been dug on the Aisne two years before.
Lloyd George, admittedly a radical and certainly no lover of his own high command, seemed to strike a just contrast when he wrote that “the solicitude with which most generals in high places (there were honourable exceptions) avoided personal jeopardy is one of the debatable novelties of modern warfare.”
the generals were trapped within the iron fetters of a technology all too adequate for mass destruction of life but quite inadequate to restore to them the flexibilities of control that would have kept destruction of life within bearable limits.
The problem of command in the circumstances of the First World War was insoluble. Generals were like men without eyes, without ears and without voices, unable to watch the operations they set in progress, unable to hear reports of their development and unable to speak to those whom they had originally given orders once action was joined. The war had become bigger than those who fought it.
The February Revolution was not political in origin or direction. It was initially a protest against material deprivation
lol what???
Fedor Linde, recorded his reaction to the first attempts at repression of the demonstrations near the Tauride Palace. “I saw a young girl trying to evade the galloping horse of a Cossack officer. She was too slow. A severe blow on the head brought her down under the horse’s feet. She screamed. It was her inhuman, penetrating scream that caused something in me to snap. [I] cried out wildly: ‘Fiends! Fiends! Long live the revolution. To arms! To arms! They are killing innocent people, our brothers and sisters!’
The Russian peasant soldier simply lacked the attitude that bound his German, French and British equivalent to comrades, unit and national cause. He “found the psychology of professional soldiers unfathomable, [regarding his] new duty as temporary and pointless.”66 Defeat rapidly brought demoralisation, so that even soldiers decorated for bravery found little shame in giving themselves up to an enemy
He knew that, 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.
Haig was adamant that they should and believed they would win a victory, the best of all reasons for fighting a battle.
their tunnelling companies had driven forward nineteen galleries, culminating in mine chambers packed with a million pounds of explosives. Just before dawn on 7 June 1917, the mines were detonated, with a noise heard in England,
was too horribly obvious that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into new shell holes, and now the water was rising about them and, powerless to move, they were slowly drowning. Horrible visions came to me with those cries, [of men] lying maimed out there trusting that their pals would find them, and now dying terribly, alone amongst the dead in the inky darkness. And we could do nothing to help them; Dunham was crying quietly beside me, and all the men were affected by the piteous cries.
Their physical deficiencies were evidence of Britain’s desperation for soldiers and Haig’s profligacy with men. On the Somme he had sent the flower of British youth to death or mutilation; at Passchendaele he had tipped the survivors into the slough of despond.
The reality of its policy was entirely contrary. On 22 July 1918, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, told the War Cabinet that it was “ ‘none of Britain’s business what sort of government the Russians set up: a republic, a Bolshevik state or a monarchy.’ The indications are that President Wilson shared this view.”52 It was a view that the French for a time shared also; until April, the dominant party in the French General Staff opposed offering support to the anti-Bolsheviks, the “so-called patriotic groups,” on the grounds that they favoured the German forces of occupation for
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That they also looked to the Czechs to reopen an Eastern offensive, and allowed themselves to be drawn progressively and piecemeal into complicity with the Whites, confuses an issue which Lenin and Stalin were later to represent in terms of outright Allied hostility to the Revolution from the start. In truth, the Allies, desperate for any diversion of German effort from their climactic offensive in France, did not become committedly anti-Bolshevik until the mid-summer of 1918 and then because the signs indicated, correctly, that the Bolsheviks had strayed from their own initially anti-German
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The counter-offensive was to result in a Bolshevik victory in the civil war, a victory brought about not despite the Allies’ eventual commitment to the Bolsheviks’ enemies but because of Germany’s positive decision to let Bolshevism survive.
it was suggested to a Marine officer by French troops retreating through their positions that he and his men should retreat also. “Retreat?” answered Captain Lloyd Williams, in words which were to enter the mythology of the Corps, “Hell, we just got here.”80
Germany’s failure to match the Allies in tank development must be judged one of their worst military miscalculations of the war.
Ludendorff paid a tribute the French would not. He attributed the growing malaise in his army and the sense of “looming defeat” that afflicted it to “the sheer number of Americans arriving daily at the front.” It was indeed immaterial whether the doughboys fought well or not. Though the professional opinion of veteran French and British officers that they were enthusiastic rather than efficient was correct, the critical issue was the effect of their arrival on the enemy. It was deeply depressing. After four years of a war in which they had destroyed the Tsar’s army, trounced the Italians and
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What about, he asked, the Fahneneide, the oath on the regimental colours which bound every German soldier to die rather than disobey? Groener uttered the unutterable. “Today,” he said, “the Fahneneide is only a form of words.”
There was historic irony in the Kaiser’s naval officers choosing a watery grave for his magnificent battleships in a British harbour. Had he not embarked on a strategically unnecessary attempt to match Britain’s maritime strength, fatal hostility between the two countries would have been avoided; so, too, in all possibility, might have been the neurotic climate of suspicion and insecurity from which the First World War was born. The unmarked graveyard of his squadrons inside the remotest islands of the British archipelago, guarding the exit from the narrow seas his fleet would have had to
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The chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history; no brave trumpets sound in memory for the drab millions who plodded to death on the featureless plains of Picardy and Poland; no litanies are sung for the leaders who coaxed them to slaughter. The legacy of the war’s political outcome scarcely bears contemplation: Europe ruined as a centre of world civilisation, Christian kingdoms transformed through defeat into godless tyrannies, Bolshevik or Nazi, the superficial difference between their ideologies counting not at all in their cruelty to common and decent
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Europe is once again, as it was in 1900, prosperous, peaceful and a power for good in the world.
Africa & Asia might disagree with the assessment of pre-WW1 Europe
Over six hundred cemeteries were eventually constructed and given into the care of the Imperial War Graves Commission which, working under a law of the French government deeding the ground as sépultures perpétuelles, recruited a body of over a thousand gardeners to care for them in perpetuity. All survive, still reverently tended by the Commission’s gardeners, much visited by the British, sometimes by the great-grandchildren of those buried within,
At the Treaty of Lausanne that concluded the war in 1923, beaten Greece and victorious Turkey agreed to exchange the minorities on each other’s soil, a process that extinguished the Greek presence in the coastal cities of the eastern Aegean, where Greeks had lived since the time of Homer and before, and brought over a million dispossessed refugees to join the four million Greeks of the mainland; many, so long separated had they been from the wellsprings of Greek culture, were Turkish-speaking. The poverty into which they entered and the griefs they brought with them were to fuel the class
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Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict?
The impulses of imperialism and militarism, directed at the rest of the world for centuries could not be contained. Those forces infected every government of Europe, blinding them with pride and delusion. The chickens come home to roost eventually.
Men whom the trenches cast into intimacy entered into bonds of mutual dependency and sacrifice of self stronger than any of the friendships made in peace and better times. That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer understanding the mystery of human life.
