A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918

by G.J. Meyer

Vienna had not consulted Berlin, now virtually no time remained for questions or objections,

Berchtold, almost certainly, had planned things this way.

Poincaré, though touched by the fervor of the Paris crowds and determined to give the Russians no reason to doubt his government’s support, was equally determined to avert hostilities if possible.

Clark says otherwise

Not even Kaiser Wilhelm or Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg understood clearly at this point that Germany was literally incapable of mobilizing without invading its neighbors to the west and thereby igniting the continental war that all of them dreaded. The final tragedy is that the tsar’s decision was based largely on the things that Sazonov told him about Germany’s preparations for war, when in fact Germany remained the only one of the continental powers to have taken no military action at all.

Is this true?

Holes were appearing in Germany’s war plans. No one had foreseen a situation in which Russia mobilized without declaring war, or in which war erupted between Germany and Russia with France waiting on the sidelines.

Berlin continued to ask Vienna to demonstrate some willingness to negotiate on the basis of various proposals being offered by London and St. Petersburg (such proposals had become numerous and complex), but Berchtold maintained his silence.

Austria had no plan that would send its army into Belgrade but no farther.

The soldiers were motivated mainly by

An open-ended postponement of hostilities after the great powers had mobilized would have destroyed Germany’s chances of defeating France before having to fight Russia.

Russian mobilization was

inherently threatening to an extent that the tsar and his advisers could not possibly have understood.

Moltke, over the years, had transformed Schlieffen’s idea for a lightning-fast attack on France from an option into an inevitability in case of war. Any delay after mobilization had gone from being a danger into being an impossibility.

Paris could have changed the outcome of the crisis only by discouraging the Russians from being so quick to mobilize. Caillaux, as premier, almost certainly would have done this.

It is difficult to judge whether Moltke’s change of thinking was rooted in a genuine expectation of success or a desperate sense that his right wing was doomed to failure.

The U-boats (Unterseebooten) sank hundreds of thousand of tons of British shipping, suffering heavy losses themselves in the process. They were, however, of little real value. At its peak their campaign was stopping less than four percent of British traffic but was arousing a ferociously negative response not only in Britain but in the United States.

Powerfully influenced by Joffre’s evident willingness to pay almost any price in the pursuit of limited objectives, Falkenhayn devised a plan for luring the French into a German-built killing machine.

His idea was to threaten some piece of ground that the French would do almost anything to hold, some piece of ground dominated by German artillery.

both sides were afraid to say anything that might be interpreted as weakness either by their enemies or by their own people, and that powerful factions in both camps were determined to win the war.

the Great War was a process by which all the great powers, victors and vanquished alike, transformed themselves from bastions of prosperity into sinkholes of poverty and debt.

Not one country attempted to meet its expenses or even reduce its deficits through increased taxes.

Tax systems became less rather than more progressive. Governments tried to limit the amounts of money available to working people for the pursuit of increasingly scarce goods while simultaneously helping the wealthy to retain their assets for investment in postwar rebuilding.

The results of all the propaganda would be tragic. By raising the stakes of the war beyond the limits of reason, the propagandists ensured that whichever side lost would feel terribly, irredeemably wronged. And that whichever side won would find it difficult to deal rationally with the populations it had defeated.

the war turned Germany into a true military dictatorship, something that it had in fact never before been.

The Russia that had been France’s most important ally in 1914 no longer existed. Postwar Russia, broken and reduced, would be little better than a satellite of Germany—unless Germany too were broken. More than at the beginning, this was now an all-or-nothing war.

stripping Russia bare would persuade the surviving members of the Entente that there was no possibility of negotiating an acceptable end to the war. It would convince them that Germany wanted nothing less than the destruction of her enemies and dominance of all Europe. Such worries had no meaning for Ludendorff. He did want the destruction of Germany’s enemies—the European ones, at any rate—and he intended to achieve exactly that. He was opposed not only by Hoffmann but by Kühlmann and Chancellor Hertling, both of whom urged restraint.

Woodrow Wilson delivered an address to Congress in which he unveiled his famous Fourteen Points.

it strengthened Ludendorff. Wilson the would-be peacemaker, by indicating that such fraught questions as Belgium and perhaps even Alsace-Lorraine might not even be open to discussion, had given Ludendorff new ammunition to use in insisting that the war had to be fought to a conclusion.

Even in the short term, the treaty was a greater misfortune for Germany than for Russia. The Bolsheviks gave away little—what they surrendered was beyond their power to hold. The Germans got a liability of enormous dimensions. At a time when they needed every available man and gun and locomotive in the west, they took on a new, ramshackle, unmanageable, and doomed eastern empire, the occupation of which would require one and a half million troops.

the Germans were now prepared to have the president tell them what the terms of peace would be, though they assumed that those terms would correspond to the Fourteen Points.

While such questions were being debated, the naval blockade was kept in place, needlessly causing the death from starvation and disease of perhaps a quarter of a million Germans, many of them children. Future president Herbert Hoover, in charge of European relief operations, begged for permission to send food to Germany and was rebuffed even by Wilson. Those Germans who did not die were left deeply, and justifiably bitter.

much the same spirit in which the Russians had accepted Brest-Litovsk, conscious of being coerced, convinced that Germany had no moral obligation to comply.