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

by G.J. Meyer

At Beaumont-Hamel, where the number of dead and wounded was unmanageably large, German soldiers slipped out of their trenches after dark and, without a word being exchanged, helped the British rescue parties with the work of retrieval.

he sent the Guards in frontal assaults straight at the guns of the Germans. He sent them seventeen times—they found themselves trying to advance through waist-deep water while being strafed by aircraft—and every attempt ended in slaughter. Brusilov, who was not even consulted, could only read the reports and grieve. When the enterprise was called off at last, fifty-five thousand Guardsmen were casualties.

Absurdly, in their final forward plunge the British commanders had pushed their line downhill from a freshly captured ridge to the low ground beyond. The only result was that thousands of troops would, for no good reason, spend a miserable winter entrenched in cold, deep mud dominated by enemy guns.

Casualties on the Somme totaled half a million British and more than two hundred thousand French.

“The first principle in position warfare,” he had decreed, “must be to yield not one foot of ground; and if it be lost to retake it by immediate counterattack, even to the use of the last man.” Ludendorff, upon making his first visit to Verdun, ordered an end to such practices and began the introduction of more flexible, less costly tactics.

Verdun was over at last. For months the battle had been little more than a struggle over a symbol. No one seemed capable of asking why the French were attacking or the Germans were bothering to defend. The crown prince, in his postwar memoir, offered the German rationale. To have walked away from ground over which so much blood had been spilled, he wrote, would have been politically impossible—would have caused explosions at home. The French in the end were fighting for nothing more substantial than glory—not France’s so much as Mangin’s glory.

The chief physician at one of Berlin’s principal hospitals reported that eighty thousand children had died of starvation in 1916.

By 1917 the German government’s expenditures amounted to 76 percent of net national product; they had been 18 percent just before the war. Tax revenues were covering only 8 percent of the spending. That same year Britain’s military spending was 70 percent of national output, and revenues were about a fourth of expenses. France’s military budget, thanks to heavy borrowing, was equal to or even more than total output.

But this was a crisis for the United States too. American manufacturers and farmers had become dependent on sales to the Entente, and American banks were owed immense amounts. A British and French financial collapse—never mind the outright defeat of the two nations—would have been a disaster for the U.S. economy. Thus the German submarines were not Washington’s only reason for wanting to save the Entente. In purely practical business terms, it became dangerous for the United States not to enter the war.

Then, after days of dispute, Zimmermann again came to the rescue of the Entente. Questioned by reporters—he was unique among German officials in his willingness to talk with the press—he blithely declared that of course the telegram was authentic. Of course he had sent it.

By the time it all ended, the Germans had taken one hundred and eighty thousand casualties, Haig’s armies a hundred and fifty-eight thousand.

Late on the day after that, April 21, a new phenomenon appeared. African troops—members of elite units that had often led the assaults of Mangin’s army—shocked and embarrassed their officers by shouting Vive la paix. “Peace! Down with war! Death to those who are responsible!” Other units were getting drunk en masse and refusing to march to the front.

By the time the offensive was shut down, it had cost the French two hundred and seventy thousand casualties, including tens of thousands killed. Total German casualties have been estimated at one hundred and sixty-three thousand.

French archives on the mutiny have been sealed since the war and will remain so until 2017, but enough is known to make clear that at its peak it was a threat to the survival of the republic.

The British, Canadians, Anzacs, and French between them had taken a quarter of a million casualties, the Germans nearly as many.

And so ended 1917. On the Western Front, the year had taken the lives of two hundred and twenty-six thousand British, one hundred and thirty-six thousand French, and one hundred and twenty-one thousand German soldiers.

The Germans had captured twelve hundred square miles, ninety thousand prisoners, more than a thousand guns, and mountains of supplies. They had inflicted more than one hundred and sixty thousand casualties on the British (the men taken prisoner included) and seventy thousand on the French. But one hundred sixty thousand of their own best troops had been killed or wounded as well, and seventy thousand had been taken prisoner.

His casualties since the start of Michael now totaled nearly three hundred and fifty thousand, one of every ten German soldiers in the western theater.

He was like a roulette player trying to recoup his losses by putting chips on more and more numbers.

complete success, and for the least excusable of reasons. Once again the defenders were commanded by a Foch disciple who had scorned Pétain’s instructions and put his main force on or near the forward line, where the German artillery devoured it.

Something new made its appearance on the Western Front during this period: the first cases of the Spanish influenza that would spread around the world and in eleven months kill more people than the war itself.

By the end one hundred and eighty-six thousand German soldiers would die of the disease along with four hundred thousand German civilians.

In March the Germans had had three hundred thousand more troops than the Allies, but between the start of Michael and the end of July more than a million of those troops, a large proportion of them the prime young men trained as storm troops, had been killed, wounded, or captured. The British and French lost half a million men each, and the French, like the Germans, had almost no replacements.

The Germans lost more than six hundred and fifty officers and twenty-six thousand troops that day. Two-thirds of them surrendered. They did so willingly, eagerly, often in large and well-armed groups.

By June 25 their losses were ruinous: one hundred and forty-two thousand men, of whom eleven thousand had been killed and tens of thousands had surrendered.

The war had rarely been bloodier—the British took a hundred and eighty thousand casualties between August 28 and September 26, and the Americans would have twenty-six thousand killed and ninety-five thousand wounded in approximately the same period.

Amazingly, the number of British, French, and American troops being killed in combat continued to exceed German fatalities.

It did so in 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.