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

by G.J. Meyer

In his seemingly endless old age Franz Joseph was a kindly but inflexible man, devoted to preserving the traditions of his ancestors, ardently hoping to live out his remaining days in peace. He remained doggedly faithful to his responsibilities if only because they were his heritage and he had no one to share them with. Once, reminiscing with Field Marshal Conrad about a general both of them had known, he said plaintively that “all are dying, only I can’t die.” When Conrad offered a courtly response, expressing gratitude for the emperor’s long life, Franz Joseph replied, “Yes, yes, but one is so alone then.”

“The event almost failed to make any impression whatever,” said one observer. “On Sunday and Monday, the crowds in Vienna listened to music and drank wine as if nothing had happened.” Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were interred at their country estate with so little fanfare that the late archduke’s friends were offended and the emperor found it necessary to explain his failure to do more.

This report became famous as the “blank check”—the promise that Berlin would be with Vienna no matter what.

This meeting was followed by a period of quiet waiting. For the sake of secrecy, and to Conrad’s consternation, little could be done to ready the Austro-Hungarian army for action. Tisza remained nettlesome. On the day after the council meeting he wrote to Franz Joseph, warning that an attack on Serbia “would, as far as can humanly be foreseen, lead to an intervention by Russia and hence to a world war.” He reverted to his original position that the demands to be made of Serbia should be “stiff but not impossible to meet, and that further action should be taken only if Serbia refuses.” Berchtold, occupied with drafting the demands, paid him no attention.

Berlin too was quiet. Kaiser Wilhelm, back to his customary weeks of summertime sailing, didn’t learn about the Austrian note until news of it reached him through the Norwegian newspapers. He was, understandably, angry at not having been informed by his own foreign office.

One solution suggested itself. If Russia showed enough firmness, perhaps Austria would hold back. By Friday, July 24, the day after the delivery of Austria’s note, the day before Serbia was supposed to reply, Sazonov was telling the Russian army’s chief of staff to get ready for mobilization. It was at this point that the Balkan crisis became a European one.

Frederick the Great is too big a subject to be dealt with in a few paragraphs. Suffice it to say that he was a writer, a composer of music that is still performed today, and a “philosopher king” according to no less a judge than Voltaire (who became his house guest and stayed so long that the two ended up despising each other). He was the first monarch in all of Europe to abolish religious discrimination, press censorship, and judicial torture. He was also a ruthless adventurer all too eager for glory, and he and his kingdom would have been destroyed except for the lucky fact that, in addition to all his other gifts, Frederick happened to be a military genius. In the course of his long life he teetered more than once on the brink of total failure—at one point he was at war with Austria, France, Russia, and Sweden simultaneously—but after any number of hair-raising escapes he raised Prussia to the ranks of Europe’s leading powers. He made the Hohenzollerns one of the leading dynasties of Europe despite never having—and giving no evidence of ever wanting—children of his own. When he died in 1786, just before the French Revolution, the crown passed to an untalented nephew.

Men with the power to decide the fate of Europe did the things that brought the war on and failed to do the things that might have kept the war from happening. They told lies, made mistakes, and missed opportunities. With few if any exceptions they were decent, well-intended men, and almost always they acted for what they thought were the best of reasons. But little of what they did produced the results they intended.

Germany, in 1914 the most modern and efficient of Europe’s industrial giants, could mobilize with a speed that was dazzling by comparison with either Russia or Austria-Hungary. Its planners were convinced that in case of war the country’s survival would depend on that speed.

Persuaded by this tale that war had begun and that Serbia was responsible, the emperor signed. In preparing to do so, he trembled so badly that he had difficulty putting on his glasses.

The Austrian declaration, issued in the middle of the afternoon, changed everything. It was one of the two or three most important blunders committed by any of the great powers during the days leading up to war.

Selim the Sot was short and fat and a drunk. He never saw a battlefield and died after eight years on the throne by falling down and fracturing his skull in his marble bath.

He was a stolid, insecure man, gloomy and filled with fear of the future, convinced that Germany’s enemies were growing stronger so rapidly that within not many more years the empire’s position would be hopeless. This fear had caused him to toy with the idea of preventive war (an idea that Bismarck had ridiculed as “committing suicide out of fear of death”), though he had never actually advocated or prepared for such a war.

If Schlieffen considered the possibility of British intervention, he obviously regarded it as an acceptable risk. Britain’s army was small (Bismarck had joked that if it ever invaded Germany, he would have it arrested).

There is no better example of how the governmental machinery created by Bismarck proved inadequate to deal with the dangers and complexities of the twentieth century, when Bismarck’s strong hand and towering intellect no longer controlled the levers of power.

Liège was no ordinary city but a ring of twelve massive forts that together made it one of the most formidable military strongpoints in the world. Each of these forts contained eight or nine big guns under armored turrets, and each was built of reinforced concrete and designed to withstand direct hits from the heaviest artillery then in existence.

There now arrived on the scene, and on the world stage, an obscure German officer who quickly established himself as the hero of the siege and with startling speed would become one of the most important men in the German army. This was Erich Ludendorff.

The first three of these armies made

up the right wing, and though that wing no longer included as big a part of the German army as Schlieffen had intended, it was still an awesome force of seven hundred and fifty thousand troops. This was war on a truly new scale; the army with which Wellington defeated Napoleon at Waterloo had totaled sixty thousand men.

The Germans, by this time, had hauled into Belgium the weapons that would decide the fate of Liège, two new kinds of monster artillery: 305mm Skoda siege mortars borrowed from Austria, plus an almost unimaginably huge 420mm howitzer secretly developed and produced by Germany’s Krupp steelworks. Neither gun had ever been used in combat. The bigger of the two weighed seventy-five tons and had to be transported by rail in five sections and set in concrete before going into action.

More than five hundred trains were crossing the Rhine every twenty-four hours; in the first sixteen days after troop movements began, 2,150 trains crossed a single bridge at Cologne—one every ten minutes.

As the Germans took possession of Brussels, they paused to give themselves a parade—the first such celebration since the Franco-Prussian War. From there, while continuing westward, they began to bend their route toward the south, toward Paris. In their wake they were leaving a trail

of killings that, even after the truth was separated from the exaggerations of propaganda, would disgrace them in the eyes of the world, give their enemies reason to argue that this was a war for civilization, and begin the long process that would end with the United States entering the war against them. They destroyed towns. They took civilian hostages, including women and children. They killed many of these hostages—in some cases machine-gunning them by the score. They killed priests simply because they were priests (while claiming that they were leaders of a guerrilla resistance). They destroyed the storybook city of Louvain, with its exquisite medieval university and irreplaceable library.

As a young French captain named Charles De Gaulle would say of the fight in which he was wounded and had his eyes opened, “In a moment it is clear that all the courage in the world cannot prevail against gunfire.”

“The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

When the first shiploads of them crossed from Southampton to Le Havre, they found the harbor jammed with crowds who burst into the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” 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.

One officer, on August 26, found himself directing artillery fire on his own house after the Russians took possession of it.

Politically, though, Germany was a kind of Rube Goldberg device. Its system of government had not evolved like those of Britain and France, had not been passed down from time immemorial like Russia’s or gradually improvised like Vienna’s. Instead it was the creation of one man, Otto von Bismarck.

In a free market for agricultural products, the Junker estates would have sunk into bankruptcy; to save them, the government enacted so many tariffs on food imports that Germany became what has been described as “a welfare agency for needy landowners.”

The consequences were fateful, almost fatal. Faith in the offensive, in the power of men wielding bayonets to overcome any enemy, caused Joffre’s generals to send their troops against German machine guns and artillery again and again in the war’s opening months, and to persist even as casualties rose to horrifying levels.

The hour of decision had arrived, and everyone knew it.

He had sent thirty-one divisions against the Russians’ forty-five infantry and eighteen cavalry divisions, and the results were inevitable. The Austrians were driven back a hundred and fifty miles to the Carpathian Mountains. Conrad had lost more than four hundred thousand men—one hundred thousand killed, an equal number taken prisoner, two hundred and twenty thousand wounded—plus 216 pieces of artillery and a thousand locomotives. He had lost more than a fourth of the manpower with which he had begun the war, and among that fourth were insupportably large numbers of Austria-Hungary’s commissioned and noncommissioned officers. Less than a month and a half into the war, his capacity for dealing effectively not just with the Russians but even with smaller enemies was nearly exhausted. From now on Vienna would be not so much Berlin’s junior partner as a weak and burdensome appendage. The Germans would grow fond of saying that being allied with the Hapsburg empire was like being “shackled to a corpse.”

He was a hard and shrewd man and a living legend, as familiar a symbol of the empire as the King. Other members of the government and the army were skeptical when he predicted that the main German invasion force would cross Belgium before entering France, incredulous when he warned that the war was going to last three years at least and that Britain would have to build an army of a million men. He was right on all points. In the end not a million but five and a half million men would serve in His Majesty’s armed forces.

Erich von Falkenhayn, the fifty-three-year-old general and former war minister who replaced a bitterly disappointed Moltke as head of the German general staff (illness was given as the excuse for Moltke’s reassignment), was quicker to see that the war was now likely to be a long one.

late, however, for such overtures to bear fruit. 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.

Kitchener proposed that Churchill be made a lieutenant general on the spot. The prime minister did not agree.

After days of murderous German shellfire that killed or wounded more than a third of the Belgians and effectively ended their ability to stand their ground, Albert played his last trump card. He ordered the opening (in some places the process required dynamite) of sluice gates in the dikes holding back the sea. The Germans, who were getting more and more men across the Yser and sensed that victory was near, could not understand what was happening. In the morning the ground was covered with ankle-deep water. Assuming that this was the result of the continuing rains, the Germans slogged on. By midnight, the water was knee-deep and still rising. The Germans not only had to give up any hope of continuing their offensive but spent a difficult night getting their troops back to dry land. Soon they were separated from the Belgians by a five-mile-wide, shoulder-deep lake, and that part of the fight was at an end.

The devastating effectiveness of the British fire, coupled with the inexperience of some of the German reserves thrown into the Ypres meat-grinder, led to perhaps the most poignant of the many butcheries of late 1914. Thousands of schoolboy recruits, many of them as young as sixteen, followed almost equally inexperienced reserve sergeants and officers in heavily massed formations directly at the waiting BEF. They formed a wall of flesh—British soldiers recalled them advancing arm in arm, singing as they came, wearing their fraternity caps and carrying flowers—that blind men could hardly have missed. They were mowed down in rows.

Flanders was disaster after disaster for both sides, and horror after horror. One evening, at the end of a day of murderous infantry gunfights under constant artillery fire, one of the German reserve units managed at tremendous cost to drive the British out of the village of Bixshoote. Later they received word that they were to be relieved overnight. In their lack of experience they assembled and marched away before their relief arrived. Observing this, the British moved in and again took possession. In the following two weeks the Germans would try again and again to retake what they had given away, failing repeatedly and always with even more casualties than before.

Burke’s Peerage, the registry of Britain’s noble families, had to postpone publication of its latest edition to make the editorial changes required by the death in combat of sixty-six peers, ninety-five sons of peers, sixteen baronets, eighty-two sons of baronets, and six knights.

Never again, in the years of fighting that lay ahead, would the Austro-Hungarians be involved in a major offensive as anything more than adjuncts to the Germans. Never again would they win a major victory they could call their own. With the war scarcely begun, they were a spent force. With almost four years of war remaining, nearly two hundred thousand of Vienna’s best troops—including ruinous numbers of its experienced officers and noncoms—were dead. Almost half a million had been wounded, and some one hundred and eighty thousand were prisoners of the Russians.

In Flanders, where there had been so much horror, 1914 ended with a strange spontaneous eruption of fellow feeling. On Christmas morning, in their trenches opposite the British near Ypres, German troops began singing carols and displaying bits of evergreen decorated in observance of the occasion. The Tommies too began to sing. Cautiously, unarmed Germans began showing themselves atop their defenses. Some of the British did the same. Step by step this led to a gathering in no-man’s-land of soldiers from both sides, to exchanges of food and cigarettes, even to games of soccer. This was the Christmas Truce of 1914, and in places it continued for more than a day. The generals, indignant when they learned of it, made certain that nothing of the kind would happen again.

“I can only love and hate, and I hate General Falkenhayn.”

As shocking as Joffre’s losses continued to be, his appetite for more of the same was undiminished. He remained certain that the war could still be a fairly short and glorious one, and he was determined to make it so.

For years—for generations, actually—none of the great powers had wanted a formal connection with Constantinople. Turkey was “the sick man of Europe,” slowly disintegrating, relentlessly dying. Its demise had been averted only by jealous disagreements among the powers over who should reap the benefits when it finally collapsed.

Five days after the start of this offensive, Ludendorff, once again at Hindenburg’s headquarters, kicked off an attack in the north. In doing so he introduced something new in warfare: gas.

The consequences were far-reaching. Three Greek divisions could have been invaluable at a time when (as the Turkish army’s history of the Dardanelles campaign would state) “it would have been possible to effect a landing successfully at any point on the peninsula, and the capture of the straits by land forces would have been comparatively easy.” Instead, the Greek government fell. It was replaced by a government friendly to the Germans, which did not displease the King of Greece, whose wife was Kaiser Wilhelm’s sister.

Churchill, seeing no need for troops and therefore not in conflict with French, impressed upon Carden that a successful assault would justify even serious costs. “The unavoidable losses must be accepted,” he declared by telegram. “The enemy is harassed and anxious now. The time is precious.” Kitchener was firmly with Churchill, saying that Britain “having entered on the project of forcing the straits, there can be no idea of abandoning the scheme.” (Lloyd George, though without military experience, observed that continuing an offensive that has already proved unsuccessful has rarely in history turned out to be a good idea.)

Haig had broken completely through—the first of only three times in the entire war that the German line would be torn open in this way.

The story of how this triumphant beginning came to nothing is a chronology of mistakes, confusion, and leadership so deficient that it explains why Max Hoffmann, when Ludendorff later in the war exclaimed that British soldiers fought like lions, replied that fortunately for Germany they were “led by donkeys.”