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

by G.J. Meyer

Like poison gas and the machine gun, like the airplane and the tank, the submarine was something new in warfare.

Some twelve hundred passengers and crew drowned, 124 Americans among them, and the United States erupted in indignation. German diplomats warned with new urgency that the U-boat attacks must stop, and on June 5 an order went out from Berlin calling a halt to the torpedoing of passenger liners on sight.

(Ludendorff wrote admiringly of how the Russian soldiers, attacking uphill and armed only with bayonets, displayed a “supreme contempt for death.”)

The intrigues were endless. In Vienna the desperate Conrad and Berchtold came up with a scheme for getting Italy to mediate a general eastern settlement. Italy’s reward would be the South Tyrol, part of Austria-Hungary’s Alpine domain. Russia would be won over with offers of part of Galicia, Constantinople, and the whole chain of waterways from the Dardanelles to the Black Sea. That these plans would have been a flagrant betrayal of the Turks and likely would have been seen as a betrayal of the Germans as well appears to have been of no concern to either Conrad or Berchtold. Emperor Franz Joseph, when he learned of the idea, dismissed Berchtold. Thus the man most responsible for the war departed the stage before the conflict was a year old.

The Second Battle of Ypres, which introduced a horrifying new element into the history of warfare, had a suitably novel and horrendous prologue.

Second Ypres began late on the afternoon of April 22 after forty-eight hours of the kind of intense artillery bombardment that everyone now knew to be the preamble to an infantry attack. This time, however, when the guns fell silent, they were followed not by waves of charging riflemen but by the opening of six thousand metal cylinders containing 168 tons of chlorine, a lethal heavier-than-air gas that stayed close to the ground as it was carried on the evening breeze toward the French lines. Chlorine had been chosen because it was readily available—the German chemical industry produced 85 percent of the world’s supply—and because of its effects: it destroys the ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen and causes its victims to drown, generally with excruciating slowness, in their own fluids.

The battle dragged on into late May, not ending until the Germans ran low on shells. They had taken forty thousand casualties, the British sixty thousand. “The profitless slaughter pit of Ypres,” as Churchill would call it, had injected two new elements into the war: mining and gas.

Not until April 25 did the invasion force steam over the horizon from the south and approach Gallipoli. It was the most powerful force ever to have attempted an amphibious landing in the face of an armed enemy.

Kemal, ordering his men to make yet another charge in which no one seemed likely to survive, uttered the words that would forever form the core of his legend. “I don’t order you to attack,” he said. “I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can take our place.”

Asquith was not a man to endanger his own position in order to defend anyone else, and so Churchill was out. He departed the Admiralty in tears, certain that his career was at an end.

A letter that Private Jack Mackenzie sent to his wife in Scotland on July 3 illuminates life on the line at a time of little action. “We relieved our fourth battalion in here, these are the trenches which they lost so many men in capturing, & is just one vast deadhouse, the stench in some places is something awful, the first thing we had to do was dig the trenches deeper & otherwise repair them & we came across bodies all over the place, you know the Germans occupied these trenches nearly the whole winter and have been losing heavily & has had to bury their killed in the trenches, there were legs and arms sticking out all over the place when we arrived but we have buried the most of them properly now. The ground behind us us [sic] is covered yet by dead Camerons and Germans who fell on the seventeenth of May & we go out at night & bury them, it is a very rotten job as they are very decomposed, but it has to be done.” Mackenzie (who would be killed in action in 1916) goes on to thank his “own darling wife” for sending food and clothing by mail, regretting only that a recently received pair of pants was not some color other than white. “But many thanks dearest for sending them,” he added, “they will do fine.”

At a huge demonstration in Red Square, people called for the tsar to be deposed, for the German-born tsarina to be confined to a convent, and for Rasputin to be hanged. The unraveling of the Romanov regime was beginning.

These disasters, coming hard on the heels of the Turkish expulsion from the Balkans in 1912 and a century of other humiliating concessions to the Europeans, inflamed the worst tendencies of the Turkish leadership. For more than a generation before the war, nationalist Turks and Islamic extremists had been saying that the Ottoman Empire, in order to be saved, must first be purified—must above all be purged of non-Muslim elements. By the spring of 1915 this idea was policy. The government of Turkey embarked upon the first true genocide of the twentieth century, the modern era’s first effort to eliminate a whole people. The target was Armenia, which the loss of Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia had left as the last large Christian population still inside the Turkish empire.

No one would ever be punished. In the years after the war the United States found it more advantageous to come to terms with the Muslims of the Middle East with their oil riches than to redress the wrongs done to an Armenian nation described by the American high commissioner in Istanbul as “a race like the Jews; they have little or no national spirit and have poor moral character.”

“The war is not over,” he was told. “Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”