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Symbolic relationships ramified those of birth. The Kaiser was Colonel of the British 1st Dragoons and an admiral in the Royal Navy; his cousin, George V, was Colonel of the Prussian 1st Guard Dragoons.
Democracy was not the problem in Britain or France, since their male populations exercised full electoral rights. It was the burden of a different sort of empire that weighed upon them, the administration of vast overseas dominions in Africa, India, Arabia, South-East Asia, the Americas and the Pacific, a source of enormous national pride but also a spur to aggressive jealousy among their European neighbours.
Even though Germany’s merchant fleet was by then the second largest in the world, the British rightly decided to regard the enactment of the Second Naval Law as an unjustified threat to its century-old command of the seas and reacted accordingly; by 1906 the race to outbuild Germany in modern battleships was the most important and most popular element of British public policy.
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.
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.
minions; as late as 1854, fifty-five years after Britain had founded a staff college, the commanders of the British army going to the Crimea chose their executives by the immemorial method of nominating friends and favourites.
Diplomacy, therefore, remained an art taught in embassies. It was a benevolent education. Europe’s diplomats were, before 1914, the continent’s one truly international class, knowing each other as social intimates and speaking French as a common language. Though dedicated to the national interest, they shared a belief that their role was to avoid war.
Though A.J.P. Taylor was flippantly wrong to characterise the outbreak of 1914 as ‘war by timetable’, since statesmen might have averted it at any time, given goodwill, by ignoring professional military advice, the characterisation is accurate in a deeper sense.
Military plans were held to be military secrets in the strictest sense, secret to the planners alone, scarcely communicable in peacetime to civilian heads of government, often not from one service to another.11 The commander of the Italian navy in 1915, for example, was not told by the army of the decision to make war on Austria until the day itself; conversely, the Austrian Chief of Staff so intimidated the Foreign Minister that in July 1914 he was left uninformed of military judgements about the likelihood of Russia declaring war.12
the ‘Schlieffen Plan’, so-called after its architect, was the most important government document written in any country in the first decade of the twentieth century;
Above all he wanted to avoid a ‘wearing-out’ war. ‘A strategy of attrition’, he wrote, ‘will not do if the maintenance of millions costs billions.’20
Michel’s plan mirrored, though he could not know it, Schlieffen’s; it even proposed an offensive into northern Belgium which would have met Schlieffen’s ‘strong right wing’ head on; with what results cannot be guessed, though surely not worse than those produced by the totally different French war plan of 1914.
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’.
Russia would not be pressed, in the crisis of mobilisation. It would accept an initial loss of territory while it rallied its army, something France could not afford.
spending on the navy and the country’s continued resistance to conscription allowed it to keep an army of only six divisions at home.
Britain, of course, enjoyed a luxury of choice the continental powers did not, the choice between ‘taking as much or as little of a war’ as it wanted;
In June 1914 the honour of Austria-Hungary, most sensitive because weakest of European powers, was touched to the quick by the murder of the heir to the throne at the hands of an assassin who identified himself with the monarchy’s most subversive foreign neighbour.
It 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.
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.
Berchtold chose to regard it as an act of war. War was now what he wanted on the terms he might have had during the days immediately following the murders, a straightforward offensive against Serbia uncomplicated by a wider conflict. The month’s delay had threatened that simplicity, but he retained hopes that diplomacy would delay the taking of irretrievable decisions by others while he settled the Serbian score.
Small though Serbia’s army was, only sixteen weak divisions, it outnumbered Austria’s ‘minimal’ group; operational prudence therefore required the commitment of the ‘swing’ grouping if a quick Serbian war were to be brought off.
Privately they accepted that general war could probably not be avoided: the sequence Russian partial mobilisation against Austria = Austrian general mobilisation = German general mobilisation = war stood stark before them.
From the murders on 28 June to the conclusion of the Austrian judicial investigation and the confessions of the conspirators on 2 July was five days. It was in the period immediately following that the Austrians might have decided for unilateral action, and taken it without strong likelihood of provoking an intervention by the Serbs’ protectors, the Russians.
Rupprecht’s and Heeringen’s Armies had been temporarily subordinated to a single staff, headed by General Krafft von Delmensingen. Thus, while the French Second and First Armies co-ordinated their actions only as well as sporadic telephoning could arrange, the German Sixth and Seventh fought as a single entity.
As dusk fell, II Corps, which had lost 8,000 killed, wounded and missing during the battle – more than Wellington’s army at Waterloo – summoned its reserves of strength to slip away and resume the retreat.
They were also the most crucial orders to be given since those for general mobilisation and until those initiating the armistice four years and two months later. For the ‘fortification and defence’ of the Aisne, which the German First and Second Armies reached on 14 September, initiated trench warfare.
Whatever the technical factors limiting the German army’s capability to manoeuvre with flexibility and at long range from railhead in 1914 – lack of mechanical transport, rigidity of signal networks working along telephone and telegraph lines – none constrained its power to dig. It was better provided with field engineer units than any army in Europe – thirty-six battalions, against twenty-six French – and better trained in rapid entrenchment.
wire. At the wettest places the defenders crouched behind sandbag mounds or brushwood barricades. In the absence of strong physical barriers to hold the enemy at a distance, it was the curtain of rifle bullets, crashing out in a density the Germans often mistook for machine-gun fire, that broke up attacks and drove the survivors of an assault to ground or sent them crawling back to cover on their start lines.
A continuous line of trenches, 475 miles long, ran from the North Sea to the mountain frontier of neutral Switzerland. Behind it the opposing combatants, equally exhausted by human loss, equally bereft of resupplies to replace the peacetime stocks of munitions they had expended in the previous four months of violent and extravagant fighting, crouched in confrontation across a narrow and empty zone of no man’s land.
All these plans, though particularly those of Ruzski and the Stavka, characterise a distinctively Russian style of warmaking, that of using space rather than force as a medium of strategy. No French general would have proposed surrendering the cherished soil of his country to gain military advantage; the German generals in East Prussia had taken the defence of its frontier to be a sacred duty. To the Russians, by contrast, inhabitants of an empire that stretched nearly 6000 miles from the ploughland of western Poland to the ice of the Bering Straits, a hundred miles here or there was a trifle
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Barbed wire, an invention of American cattle ranchers in the 1870s, had begun to appear, strung in belts between the opposing trenches by the spring.
trench interiors floored with wooden walkways. Militarily, the German front grew in strength week by week. Domestically, it was even becoming comfortable. Electric light was appearing in the deeper dugouts, together with fixed bedsteads, planked floors, panelled walls, even carpets and pictures. Rearward from their underground command posts ran telephone lines to their supporting artillery batteries. The Germans were settling in for the long stay.
The eighty French departments not directly touched by the war were largely agricultural. The ten occupied by the Germans contained much of French manufacturing industry and most of the country’s coal and iron ores.
What would scarcely change for the next twenty-seven months was the length of the front or the geographical trace which it followed.
in March 1917, the Germans voluntarily surrendered the central Somme sector and retired to shorter, stronger, previously prepared lines twenty miles to the rear.
Over its last fifty miles the front ran generally within German territory – though French before 1871 – through the high Vosges, across the Belfort gap until it reached the Swiss frontier near the village of Bonfol.
It was therefore only on the dry chalklands of the Somme and the Champagne that attacks offered the promise of decisive success. The former stood below the wet Flemish country, the latter above the mountainous forest zone of the Meurthe and Moselle. They were separated from each other by the high ground of the Aisne and Meuse, the bulge in the front to which they formed the shoulders. Military logic therefore required that it was at those shoulders that the attackers should make their major efforts and defenders be best prepared to withstand an assault.
the strategic advantage rested with the French, though the tactical advantage rested with the Germans, who had chosen the pick of the ground at the final points of contact.
Since strategic geography is a major determinant of strategic choice, the geographical advantage enjoyed by the French disposed them to attack.
France, as the victim of Germany’s offensive of August 1914, and the major territorial loser in the outcome of the campaign, was bound to attack. National pride and national economic necessity required it. Germany, by contrast, was bound to stand on the defensive, since the setbacks she had suffered in the east, in its two-front war, demanded that troops be sent from France to Poland for an offensive in that region.
In the circumstances, Falkenhayn had convinced himself that 1915 must be a year of offence in the west and defence in the east, within the larger policy of bringing Russia to make a separate peace. He lacked, however, the authority to carry his case.
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.
The victory of the Falklands terminated the high seas activity of the German navy.
After the Falklands, indeed, the oceans belonged to the Allies and the only persistent naval surface fighting, pending a clash of the capital fleets in the North Sea, took place in landlocked waters, the Black Sea, the Baltic and the Adriatic.
Nearly 2,000 were killed and 12,000 wounded. The very high proportion of wounded was to prove a recurrent feature of the campaign, rock splintered by exploding shells becoming secondary projectiles which caused frequent injury, particularly to the head, and eyes.
It had long been an ambition of the Tsars to complete their centuries of counter-offensive against the Ottomans by seizing Constantinople, thus recovering the seat of Orthodox Christianity from Islam and securing a permanent southward access to warm water; it stood high among Russia’s current war aims.
a freak storm, which drowned soldiers in their trenches and wrecked many of the beach facilities, concluded the arguments.
The Turks, who bothered neither to bury nor count their dead, had probably lost 300,000 men killed, wounded and missing.61 The Allies had lost 265,000.
Yet of all the contingents which went to Gallipoli, it was the Australians who were most marked by the experience and who remembered it most deeply, remember it indeed to this day. Citizens of an only recently federated country in 1915, they went as soldiers of the forces of six separate states. They came back, it is so often said, members of one nation.
Two-thirds of the Australians who went to the Great War became casualties and the first of the nation’s Great War heroes won their medals in the two square miles above ANZAC cove. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren often bring those medals back with them to Gallipoli on their pilgrimage, as if to reconsecrate the symbols of the ANZAC spirit, a metaphor for that of the nation itself, on sacred soil.
