The First World War

by John Keegan

IF THE WAR OF 1914 was not a war which the armies of Europe were ready to fight, that was not so with Europe’s great navies.

The armies, as the opening campaigns had proved, were technically equipped to solve certain easily perceived problems, in particular how to overcome the defences of modern fortresses, how to move vast numbers of men from home bases to the frontiers and how to create impassable storms of rifle and field-artillery fire when those masses came into contact with each other. They were quite unequipped to deal with the unperceived and much more critical problems of how to protect soldiers from such fire storms, how to move them, under protection, about the battlefield, indeed how to move them at all beyond railhead unless on their feet, and how to signal quickly and unambiguously between headquarters and units, between unit and unit, between infantry and artillery, between ground and the aircraft with which, almost fortuitously, the armies had so recently provided themselves.

In 1896 the Royal Navy, still the world leader, was launching battleships of 13,000 tons, armed with four 12-inch guns and capable of a speed of eighteen knots from piston engines fired by coal. By 1913 its most modern battleships, of the Queen Elizabeth class, displaced 26,000 tons, mounted eight 15-inch guns and achieved speeds of twenty-five knots from turbine engines fired by oil.

The armies of 1914 may not have been very efficient battle-winning organisations; the Dreadnought fleets were as efficient as they could be made within the constraints of available technology.

The navy was in Germany the junior, not, as in Britain, the senior service, and many of its officers felt it had to fight whatever the odds, if it were to keep the esteem of the German people, particularly at a time when the German army was pouring out its blood for the nation.

Scheer quickly resumed the policy of taking the fleet to sea in the search for action. He made two sorties in February and March 1916 and four in April and May; in the April sortie he succeeded in reaching the English east coast and, in a repetition of the raids of 1914, bombarding Lowestoft.

Scheer’s decision to take the whole of the High Seas Fleet into the North Sea, something never ventured before, was predicated on the belief that the British would not have foreknowledge of his movements.

Jutland, in consequence, was to be both the biggest and the last purely surface encounter of main fleets in naval history.

Jutland is the most written about battle of naval history and the most disputed between scholars. Each segment, almost every minute of the two fleets’ engagement have been described and analysed by historians, official and unofficial, without any reaching agreement about exactly what happened or why, or whether, indeed, the outcome was a British or a German victory. That it was a British victory of some sort is not now denied. That it was less than a decisive victory is not denied either. It was the disparity between British expectations of victory and the success actually achieved that led to the detailed dissection of the battle’s events and the controversy that persists to this day. The Royal Navy, undefeated in a major fleet action since Trafalgar, sailed for Jutland in the sure belief that, should a junction of battlefleets ensue, another Trafalgar would occur. The inconclusiveness of the event has continued to haunt the mind of the Royal Navy ever since.

The major addition to the fighting strength of the Allies, however, was British.

Falkenhayn outlined his reasoning in a letter written to the Kaiser on Christmas Day 1915. Germany’s object, he insisted, must be to dishearten Britain on whose industrial and maritime power the Alliance rested. He therefore argued for a resumption of the unrestricted U-boat campaign.

Had the Germans attacked in strength they must have overrun the devastated enemy positions on the eight-mile front, but they did not. The philosophy of the operation was that artillery would destroy the French defences, which would then be occupied by the infantry in follow-up. Driant and half of his soldiers survived until the next day, when stronger waves of Germany infantry appeared to overwhelm them.

Verdun seemed on the point of falling. 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 come.

by 1916, the French had discovered that shellfire often sounded much worse than it was, had nerved themselves to sit it out and to repay the infantry attacks that followed with murderous small-arms fire.

to both armies Verdun had become a place of terror and death that could not yield victory.

Verdun had been planned by Falkenhayn as an operation to ‘bleed white’ the French army and knock Britain’s ‘best sword’ out of her hand. Even by June, when the battle still had six months to run, it had failed in both its purposes and, as it failed, Falkenhayn’s credibility as Chief of Staff had waned also.

Douglas Haig, commander of the BEF’s First Army, was sinuous in his relationships with the great, particularly at court. He had precipitately married a royal lady-in-waiting after the briefest of introductions and had accepted an invitation to correspond privately with King George V soon after the Western Front had relapsed into stalemate. Others in the BEF hierarchy shared by the end of 1915 the belief that French had proved his incapacity to continue in supreme command, and their views were made known to the government. It was Haig, however, who wielded the dagger. During a visit by the King to France at the end of October, he told him directly that French was ‘a source of great weakness to the army, and no one had confidence in him any more’. All that was true, but it would have come better from Haig had he not added that he himself was ready to do his duty in any capacity. ‘Any capacity’ clearly meant as French’s successor which, after further consultations between the King, the Prime Minister and Kitchener, still Secretary of State for War, though his perch was creaking also, he became on 16 December 1915.42

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.

So certain were Haig and most of his subordinates of the crushing effect the artillery would produce, that they had decided not to allow the inexperienced infantry to advance by the tried and tested means of ‘fire and movement’, when some lay down to cover with rifle volleys the advance of the rest, but to keep them moving forward upright and in straight lines.

Almost everything that Haig and Rawlinson expected of the enormous artillery effort they had prepared was not to occur.

What the infantry should have done in such circumstances has generated an enormous literature, much of it quite recent. 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. An underlying theme is that, dreadful as the experience of the early offensives was, it provided a learning process through which the survivors and their successors won the eventual victories of 1918, an argument akin to the thought that Dunkirk was a valuable rehearsal in amphibious operations for D-Day.

When, in the days that followed, the 200 British battalions that had attacked began to count the gaps in their ranks, the realisation came that, of the 100,000 men who had entered no man’s land, 20,000 had not returned; another 40,000 who had been got back were wounded. In summary, a fifth of the attacking force was dead, and some battalions, such as the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, had ceased to exist. The magnitude of the catastrophe, the greatest loss of life in British military history, took time to sink in.

the Germans had brought up several reserve divisions during the day, while the losses suffered by their troops in line – about six thousand altogether – were a tenth of those of the British.

By 31 July, the Germans on the Somme had lost 160,000, the British and French over 200,000, yet the line had moved scarcely three miles since 1 July.

As early as December 1914 a visionary young officer of the Royal Engineers, Ernest Swinton, having recognised that only a revolutionary means could break what was already the stalemate of barbed wire and trench on the Western Front, had proposed the construction of a cross-country vehicle, armoured against bullets, that could bring firepower to the point of assault. The idea was not wholly new – it had been anticipated, for example, in H.G. Wells’s short story The Land Ironclads of 1903, and in an imprecise form by Leonardo da Vinci

The Germans may have lost over 600,000 killed and wounded in their effort to keep their Somme positions. The Allies had certainly lost over 600,000, the French casualty figure being 194,451, the British 419,654. The holocaust of the Somme was subsumed for the French in that of Verdun. To the British, it was and would remain their greatest military tragedy of the twentieth century, indeed of their national military history.

The addition of the nominal fighting power of lesser states – Portugal (which became a combatant in March 1916), Romania and even Italy – did not enhance the strength of the Allies but, on the contrary, diminished it, once the inevitable setbacks they underwent came to require the diversion of resources to shore them up.

The defeat of Romania not only necessitated, as Alexeyev had foreseen, the commitment of the Russian armies to rescue them from total collapse. It also delivered into German hands, over the next eighteen months, a million tons of oil and two million tons of grain, the resources that ‘made possible the . . . continuation of the war into 1918’.

The chief effect of two years of bombardment and trench-to-trench fighting across no man’s land was to have created a zone of devastation of immense length, more than 400 miles between the North Sea and Switzerland, but of narrow depth: defoliation for a mile or two on each side of no man’s land, heavy destruction of buildings for a mile or two more, scattered demolition beyond that.

Four days in the front line, four in support, four at rest; on their days off, young officers, like John Glubb, might take a horse and ride ‘down old neglected rides, while all round my head was a dazzling bower of light emerald green.

On 5 June 1916, Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, en route to Russia on an official visit, was drowned when the cruiser Hampshire struck a mine north of Scotland.

In their time, almost all the leading commanders of the war were seen as great men, the imperturbable Joffre, the fiery Foch, the titanic Hindenburg, the olympian Haig. Between the wars their reputations crumbled, largely at the hands of memoirists and novelists – Sassoon, Remarque, Barbusse – whose depiction of the realities of ‘war from below’ relentlessly undermined the standing of those who had dominated from above. After the Second World War the assault on reputation was sustained, in that era by historians, popular and academic, particularly in Britain, who continued to portray the British generals as ‘donkeys leading lions’, as flinthearts bleeding the tender flesh of a generation to death in Flanders fields, or as psychological misfits.3 There were counter-attacks, particularly to salvage the reputation of Haig, who had become an Aunt Sally to playwrights, film directors and television documentary makers committed to the view that the First World War exposed the oppressiveness of the British class structure. Little ground, however, was won back.4 By the end of the century the generals, who had stood so high at the end of its Great War, had been brought, it appeared, irredeemably low by a concerted offensive against their names and their works.

many generals did expose themselves to risk, which it was not necessarily or even properly their duty to accept. Among British generals, thirty-four were killed by artillery and twenty-two by small-arms fire; the comparable figure for the Second World War is twenty-one killed in action.

the nearer a general was to the battle, the worse placed was he to gather information and to issue orders. Only at the point of junction of telephone lines, necessarily located behind the front, could he hope to gather intelligence of events and transmit a considered response to them.

Most of the accusations laid against the generals of the Great War – incompetence and incomprehension foremost among them – may therefore be seen to be misplaced.

In Germany the resolution of the army and the people remained strong. Although over a million soldiers had been killed by the end of 1916 – 241,000 in 1914, 434,000 in 1915, 340,000 in 1916

Britain maintained peacetime levels of food imports until mid-1917, when the German U-boat campaign began to bite hard,

Luxuries, particularly coffee, which had become a German necessity, disappeared from the tables of all but the rich, and real necessities, like soap and fuel, were strictly rationed. ‘By the end of 1916, life . . . for most citizens . . . became a time of eating meals never entirely filling, living in underheated homes, wearing clothing that proved difficult to replace and walking with leaky shoes. It meant starting and ending the day with substitutes for nearly everything.’

In Britain, which had begun to suffer mass loss of life only in 1916, the determination to see it through held even stronger.

The first day of the battle of Arras was a British triumph. In a few hours the German front was penetrated to a depth of between one and three miles, 9,000 prisoners were taken, few casualties suffered and a way apparently cleared towards open country.

In general, however, the objects of the mutinies had been achieved. The French army did not attack anywhere on the Western Front, of which it held two-thirds, between June 1917 and July 1918, nor did it conduct an ‘active’ defence of its sectors.

It was the shortage of food which provoked what would come to be known as the February Revolution

By the end of 1917 nearly four million Russians were in German or Austrian hands, so that the old imperial army’s prisoner losses eventually exceeded battlefield casualties by three to one; the most recent estimate of Russian battlefield deaths is 1.3 million, or about the same as the French, whose loss of prisoners to the Germans was trifling.65

It is greatly to the credit of Russia’s enemies in the First World War that they showed a duty of care to their myriads of prisoners not felt in the Second, when three of the five million Soviet soldiers captured on the battlefield died of starvation, disease and mistreatment. Perhaps because captivity did not threaten hardship, the Russian army had begun to disintegrate even before the collapse at the rear.

It was only after unification that Italy’s military troubles began.

Italian discipline was harsher also. 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.

In the spring of 1917, the German navy, with about a hundred submarines available for operations in the North Sea, Atlantic, Baltic and Mediterranean, was ordered to open unrestricted attack against the twenty million tons of British shipping, out of a total of thirty million worldwide, on which the British homeland depended for survival.

In the spaces of the sea, a group of ships is little more conspicuous than a single ship, and, if not found by a U-boat, all would escape attack. Single ships sailing in succession, by contrast, presented the U-boat with a higher chance of making a sighting and so a sinking.

By June, with the truth of the French mutinies no longer deniable, it was clear that the British would have to fight alone.

The Germans may have suffered worse – statistical disputes make the argument profitless – but, while the British had given of their all, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had another army in Russia with which to begin the war in the west all over again. Britain had no other army. Like France, though it had adopted conscription later and as an exigency of war, not as a principle of national policy, it had by the end of 1917 enlisted every man that could be spared from farm and factory and had begun to compel into the ranks recruits whom the New Armies in the heyday of volunteering of 1914–15 would have rejected on sight: the hollow-chested, the round-shouldered, the stunted, the myopic, the over-age. 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.