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

by G.J. Meyer

Their planning became so rigid that it left Germany—today this can seem almost impossible to believe—with no way of mobilizing without invading Luxembourg and Belgium en route to invading France.

This fear rose out of the belief, the conviction, that Germany was encircled by enemies who were growing stronger at an alarming rate, and that if the showdown were delayed just a few years more there might be no possibility of victory, even of survival.

In his splendid isolation Schlieffen assumed that Germany’s enemies were intent not just on her defeat but on her destruction, and that as a result she was justified in doing things that under less harrowing circumstances would not have been thinkable.

This was “the cult of the offensive”—the belief that the only way to succeed in war was to attack your enemy as quickly as possible and then stay on the attack regardless of the consequences.

In the Franco-Prussian War the Germans had suffered significant casualties at the hands of franc-tireurs, civilian snipers and guerrillas, some of whom were urged on by French priests. They were determined not to have a repeat.

The thousands of British troops—Tommies, they were called at home—responded by bursting spontaneously not into “God Save the King” but into one of the indelicate music hall songs with which they entertained themselves while on the march. The French watched and listened reverently, some with their hands on their hearts, not understanding a word and thinking that this must be the anthem of the United Kingdom.

They were to win at the point of their bayonets, not by firing steel-clad packets of high explosives into the sky. The Germans, by contrast, quickly became adroit, upon making contact with the enemy, at digging in, waiting to be attacked, and mowing down the attackers with rifle fire, machine guns capable of firing up to six hundred heavy-caliber rounds per minute, and above all artillery.

ignorant of the new French army taking shape to the west, wrong in believing that the mysterious disappearance of the British meant that the BEF was no longer an effective fighting force.

From the German perspective, the story of the Schlieffen right wing had a melancholy final chapter. At almost the same moment when Kluck was accepting the necessity of retreat, Quast’s corps was tearing apart the last of the disintegrating French defenses. Nothing lay between it and Paris but thirty miles of open, undefended ground. It must have been like having an impossible dream come true: all they had to do was keep marching. But then new orders arrived from Kluck: Quast was to call off his attack and turn back. The First Army was retreating.

None of the warring governments thought they could possibly accept a settlement in which they did not win something that would justify all the deaths. The war had become self-perpetuating and self-justifying.

“I can only love and hate, and I hate General Falkenhayn,” Ludendorff declared. “It is impossible for me to work together with him.”

Just as Ludendorff was ready to move, heavy snow began to fall. It fell for two days, accumulating to a depth of five feet as temperatures fell to forty degrees below zero. The Germans attacked anyway.

The winter campaign, by the time it ended, added eight hundred thousand Austrian casualties to the million of 1914.

Their way would be cleared by fire from a concentration of artillery that would not be equaled until 1917: one field gun for every five yards of front, one heavier piece for every nineteen.

It was the most powerful force ever to have attempted an amphibious landing in the face of an armed enemy. Two hundred transport ships were accompanied by eighteen battleships, a dozen cruisers, twenty-nine destroyers, and eight submarines.

At one of them, 700 of the first thousand troops to land were mowed down by machine-gun fire; at the end of the day only four hundred British were both on dry land and alive.

When the battle came to its end on June 18, the French had lost more more than a hundred thousand men, the Germans just under fifty thousand.

Its armies, in disorderly retreat in the southeast and threatened in Poland as well, had taken more than four hundred thousand casualties in May alone (bringing their total for ten months of war to almost four million).

The Young Turks found here all the justification they needed for actions that in peacetime probably would have been unimaginable. They began in comparatively innocuous fashion, disarming their Armenian soldiers and assigning them to labor battalions. Then they proceeded to work, and starve, those battalions to death. Next, having eliminated the part of the population most capable of defending itself, they sent an army onto the plateau that had long been home to most of Turkey’s Armenians. In town after town and city after city, all males over the age of twelve were gathered up and shot or hacked to death en masse. Women were raped and mutilated, and those who were not killed were sold into slavery. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were marched off to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Many died of exposure, starvation, or exhaustion along the way, and others were murdered by their Kurdish escorts. The pogrom spread across all of Turkey. In Constantinople thousands of convicted criminals were organized into death squads whose only assignment was to kill every Armenian they could find, giving first priority to those intellectuals, professionals, and religious and political leaders who might have the potential to serve as leaders. The families of Turkish officials took the choicest booty; the death squads and rabble took the rest.

he believed that only the support of Joffre and Foch was preventing his own government from removing him from command, and that his future depended on keeping that support.

They came up out of their hiding places, showing their heads aboveground in order to survey the damage and watch for the coming attack. German spotters observed them and directed fire onto every point where the French had revealed themselves. The bombardment went on for hours more.

His thoughts were focused on driving the French to despair and, once they came to terms, making Britain despair as well. These hopes underlay his strategy at Verdun.

The first two divisions would not arrive until February 12—the day Falkenhayn had chosen for the start of his attack.

The worst of the tactical problems began with the strange ambiguities of Falkenhayn’s plan—a plan aimed not at capturing Verdun but at bringing the French army within range of the German artillery and, in the general’s words, bleeding it white. His goal at the start of the campaign was simply to mass his artillery in the hills north of the city, force the French to try to drive those guns away, and blow them to pieces as they did.

What they didn’t know, because Falkenhayn didn’t tell them, was that he didn’t really care whether Verdun was captured or not.

He was relinquishing the opportunity to make one lightning strike and then fight on the defensive.

the two infantry divisions on the cutting edge of the attack would report fewer than two thousand men killed or missing in the first month of the battle. By contrast, French deaths exceeded twenty-three thousand in the first five days.

The main German reserve force was still under the control of Falkenhayn, who refused to release it. He thereby wasted his second chance to take Verdun. He was sticking with his plan and in so doing was fatally outsmarting himself.

In time three-fourths of the entire French army—125 divisions—would be rotated through Verdun, so that it more than any other battle of the war became a shared national experience.

In preparation for his offensive, Falkenhayn had sent batteries of long-range naval guns to Verdun; the road was within their range. The Germans also had almost total control of the air over Verdun at this early stage; with bombing and strafing their aircraft could have reduced the road to chaos. Somehow—another of the war’s many mysteries—the Germans failed to make use of these opportunities.

The Russians responded with yet another expression of their almost touching readiness to try to come to the rescue whenever asked—an eagerness that contrasted sharply with the cynicism and contempt that so often tainted relations between the British and the French.

Only the tsar was really eager.

“One must have lived through these hours in order to get an idea of it,” a French chaplain said of life in one of the fortresses blocking approaches to the hill. “It seems as though we are living under a steam hammer…You receive something like a blow in the hollow of the stomach. But what a blow!…Each explosion knocks us to the ground. After a few hours one becomes somewhat dumbfounded.” He wrote of badly wounded men left unattended for eight days, “lying down, dying of hunger, suffering thirst to the extent that they were compelled to drink their urine.”

On the day Nivelle arrived at Verdun, Tsar Nicholas peremptorily discharged Alexei Polivanov as minister of war, thereby removing a man who, in the months since his appointment, had been achieving near-miracles. Polivanov had been fearless in flushing corruption and incompetence out of the administration of the Russian war effort and in repairing the damage done to the tsar’s armies in 1915. He was dismissed not because of the defeat at Lake Naroch, in which he had no role, but because Tsarina Alexandra hated him and had long wanted him put out of the way. As a reformer, Polivanov was despised by the court’s inner circle; he was willing to work cooperatively with the national legislature that the tsar had been forced to create in the bloody turbulence following the Russo-Japanese War; and he had tried to dissuade Nicholas from assuming command of the army in 1915. All these things, in Alexandra’s small and rigid mind, made him an enemy of the autocracy that she was pathologically committed to preserving for her son. His final offense, the one that finished him, was to intervene when he learned that four of the war ministry’s fastest automobiles had been handed over to Rasputin to enable him to escape police agents.

(The mystery of how men could hold their ground under such circumstances is explained in part by what awaited them in the rear: their own sergeants and junior officers, ready to shoot them on the spot if they tried to escape.)

Even Knobelsdorf conceded that enough was enough. He promised, in fact, to visit Falkenhayn that same day and try to persuade him to bring Verdun to an end. What happened next has never been explained. When he reached Falkenhayn’s headquarters, Knobelsdorf did the opposite of what he had promised. He told Falkenhayn that the French guns at Le Mort Homme would soon be silenced and that the east bank offensive could then be safely resumed.

the Austrian was deeply offended. He decided not only to proceed with an Italian campaign but to tell the Germans nothing of what he was doing.

He perfected his isolation by keeping all communications on a one-way basis, and by sending out detailed instructions as to exactly what the Austrian divisions in the Trentino were to do, and when and where, while ignoring questions and suggestions.

No discussion was wanted or tolerated. When the chief of staff of the army group being formed in the Trentino requested permission to travel to Silesia and confer with Conrad, he was refused.

Many times the number of troops needed to do the job were with Evert in the northwest, but Evert remained unwilling either to attack or to let go of any of his divisions. June 13, the day on which Evert had pledged himself to an attack, came and went without action. This was a mortal failure.

Rawlinson and Haig never resolved their differences; rather, they opened the battle without coming to an understanding on what they were trying to do or how it should be done.

“You will be able to go over the top with a walking stick, you will not need rifles,” one officer told his troops. “When you get to Thiepval [a village that was one of the first day’s objectives] you will find the Germans all dead. Not even a rat will have survived.”

What turned these misfortunes into a scandal was the refusal of senior British commanders, in spite of repeated warnings from observers up on the front lines, to believe that the wire had not been destroyed.

To the extent that further motivation was required, it was provided by warnings that any man who failed to advance would be shot by his sergeants.

Instead of coming forward in a rush, instead of ducking and dodging and making use of whatever cover the terrain offered, the British were lined up shoulder to shoulder in plain view. Instead of running, they were walking almost slowly, as if to demonstrate their skill at close-order drill. Rifles and bayonets at the ready, they were like a vision out of the era of flintlock musketry. If this was little short of insane, it was also exactly what had been ordered: a high-precision advance by soldiers in tidy rows. This was Rawlinson’s idea. He thought that his troops, inexperienced as they were, would be incapable of advancing in any other way.

Wherever they found themselves approaching uncut wire, as happened to unit after unit, they had no choice but to search out gaps and try to crowd through. Thus their slow-moving lines, or the parts of them that reached the wire, had to jam together in clusters barely able to move at all.

The Germans simply pointed their machine guns at these knots of flesh and cut them down in swaths. “We were surprised to see them walking,” said a German machine-gunner. “We had never seen that before…When we started to fire we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. We didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.”

The number of casualties had reached sixty thousand, and almost twenty thousand of them were dead. It was the worst day in the history of British warfare.

German losses for the first day on the Somme totaled approximately eight thousand, including two thousand men taken prisoner—

Before it was over the German gunners, at points in the center where the carnage had been most terrible, found themselves unwilling to continue firing.