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

by G.J. Meyer

Thirty-four long, sweet summer days separated the morning of June 28, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was shot to death, from the evening of August 1, when Russia’s foreign minister and Germany’s ambassador to Russia fell weeping into each other’s arms and what is rightly called the Great War began.

The murders aroused little interest in Britain and France. Both countries were focused on other stories, London on a crisis over Ireland, Paris on a sensational murder trial that combined sex with political scandal. And assassinations were not unusual in those days. In the two decades before 1914, presidents of the United States, France, Mexico, Guatemala, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic had been murdered. So had prime ministers of Russia, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Persia, and Egypt, and kings, queens, and empresses of Austria, Italy, Serbia, Portugal, and Greece. People had grown accustomed to such things and to expecting that their consequences would not be terribly serious.

the tsar—the word means “caesar” in Russian, as does kaiser in German—what

Three years after the annexation crisis, the Balkans began to convulse. It is a measure of just how far the decay of the Ottoman Empire had advanced that in 1912 the minuscule nation of Montenegro launched an attack on the once-invincible Turks. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece all joined in, and in a single stunning month the Turks were driven from a region they had dominated for more than five hundred years. The map of the Balkans was redrawn. Immediately the victors doubled in size. Serbia was now big enough to be, not a major power certainly, but a real military problem for Austria.

Their hopes were fulfilled. Franz Joseph, born during the presidency of Andrew Jackson and crowned twelve years before the election of Abraham Lincoln, was still on the throne when Woodrow Wilson moved into the White House.

In 1867 Franz Joseph’s younger brother Maximilian, who three years earlier had quixotically accepted an invitation to go to Mexico and become its emperor, was shot to death there by a firing squad.

In 1870, with Austria on the sidelines looking on, Prussia led a confederation of German states in a swift and stunning victory over France. The Franco-Prussian War led to the creation of a new German Empire in which the King of Prussia was elevated to kaiser and from which Austria was excluded.

Nine years later Empress Elizabeth was stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist who had hoped to kill King Umberto I of Italy but, unable to raise the train fare to Rome, settled for her.

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

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.

By declining to yield, the Serbs gave Berchtold, Conrad, and their cohorts the one thing they wanted: an excuse for military action.

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.

Sir Edward Grey, from his office at the foreign ministry, made his famous comment that “the lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” (Ironically, long before the war’s end Grey would have to retire from public life because he was going blind.)

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.

He did so with the same deep reluctance shown by Franz Joseph when asked to declare war on Serbia, and by Tsar Nicholas when begged for mobilization. Like his fellow emperors, he yielded only because the military men, now taking charge in Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Vienna, were insisting that there was no alternative.

A mass of infantry on the move is like nothing else in the world, but it may usefully be thought of as an immensely long and cumbersome caterpillar with the head of a nearsighted tiger. (The monstrousness of the image is not inappropriate.)

Great battles can be won when a tiger’s head eludes or even accidentally misses the head of its enemy and makes contact with its body instead. When this happens the enemy is “taken in the flank,” and if an attacking head has sufficient weight it can quickly tear the enemy’s body apart, finally reducing even the head to an isolated, enfeebled remnant. Much the same can happen when an army on the move is taken in the rear, or surrounded and cut off from its lines of supply.

Rupprecht’s counterattack, for all its success, is a serious mistake. It neither destroys the French Sixth Army nor captures anything of strategic importance. Instead it pushes the French backward out of Moltke’s trap, returning them to their line of fortresses.

Or so it seemed until Sunday, August 23. Then, suddenly, Kluck crashed into a mass of dug-in riflemen freshly arrived from England. It must have been a shock. Kluck hadn’t known that British troops were in the neighborhood. He hadn’t even known, until the day before, that they were in France in sufficient numbers to take the field.

Legally, officially, Ireland was no longer a British possession at all, no longer a colony but rather as integral a part of the United Kingdom as Scotland and Wales. Its elected representatives sat in Parliament. They were numerous enough not only to influence policy but, when the House of Commons was narrowly divided, to cause governments to rise and fall. For the mainly Catholic nationalists of Ireland, such power was not nearly enough. They argued, and not implausibly, that in reality their homeland was still what it had been for centuries: conquered and oppressed. They wanted their own parliament and government—Home Rule. But for the Ulstermen of northern Ireland, descendants of the Protestants transplanted from Scotland by Oliver Cromwell two and a half centuries earlier when to be a Catholic was a crime, Home Rule meant subjection to the pope in Rome. They—the Unionists—were prepared to fight Home Rule to the death.

His contempt for Asquith, whom he called “Squiff” in his diary, and for Asquith’s “filthy cabinet,” was only a somewhat extreme example of the prevailing army attitude.

(The Germans, in demanding free passage through Belgium, had promised to pay for all damage done by their army.) Tuesday brought the answers. Masses of German troops began crossing the border into Belgium and moved on Liège. King Albert made it clear that he and his countrymen intended to fight.

The BEF was also an appealingly human, high-spirited army. Even the rank and file were career soldiers for the most part, volunteers drawn mainly from Britain’s urban poor and working classes, more loyal to their regiments and to one another than to any sentimental notions of imperial glory, and ready to make a joke of anything.

When they learned what the kaiser had said about them, they began to call themselves “the Old Contemptibles.”

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 wit...

Ahead of them in the darkness was the entire German First Army. Its commander, Kluck (it was a gift to the amateur songwriters of the BEF that his name rhymed with their favorite word),

Lanrezac, rather than holding his ground at Charleroi, was pulling back. This exposed the British right and gave them no choice but to pull back as well. French reacted bitterly. He regarded Lanrezac’s withdrawal—which probably saved his army and was conducted with great skill under difficult circumstances—as unnecessary. He had entered the war with a very British disdain for the French. That disdain now began to turn into entirely unjustified contempt.

Joffre’s other commanders believed that French troops were supposed to charge, not crawl in the earth like worms. 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. (From the start of the war to the end, cannon would account for most of the killing.)

Much of the Eighth Army was made up of East Prussians, men with personal reasons for wanting to clear the region of invaders. One officer, on August 26, found himself directing artillery fire on his own house after the Russians took possession of it.

Total casualties were two hundred and fifty thousand for the Russians, about thirty-seven thousand for the Germans. The Germans decided to call what had just happened the Battle of Tannenberg because a nearby town of that name had been the site of a terrible German defeat at the hands of the Poles hundreds of years before. Hindenburg’s ancestors had taken part in that battle.

The Germany that Hindenburg and his kind dominated had come a long way since the Franco-Prussian War. Long regarded as the land of musicians and dreamy philosophers and Black Forest elves, by 1914 it was the most modern, efficient, innovative, and powerful economy in Europe.

It may have been the haughtiness of his tone—“I think you had better trust me to watch the situation and act according to circumstances”—that prompted Kitchener to don his field marshal’s uniform and cross the Channel by destroyer that night.

Worst, when he understood just how rich in opportunity this situation was, how laden with potential glory, Joffre took the Sixth Army back from Gallieni, who then returned to Paris.

“Kluck marched his entire army back across the Marne to the Ourcq” is far too simple a statement to reflect what was happening that day. Every such movement meant yet another long and hurried trek, to be followed by yet another firefight, for men who had been marching and fighting for weeks. Kluck’s men had been issued no rations in five days. They rarely got more than a few hours of sleep. Their uniforms were in tatters, and their boots were falling off their feet as they struggled to drag with them the cannon and shells without which they could neither attack nor defend themselves. And they were now outnumbered.

one British division spent an entire day moving in a confused circle, so that at nightfall its lead units ran into the supply train that formed its own tail end.

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.”

In his new post (he did not relinquish his commission as the army’s senior field marshal, or the salary that went with it) he was the first serving officer to hold a British cabinet post since the 1600s.

It is one measure of the sustained intensity of this new kind of warfare that the French faced critical shortages of ammunition for the 75mm cannon, their most effective field artillery piece, because only ten thousand rounds were being produced per day. This was barely 20 percent of the need.

Almost immediately, both sides encountered immovable resistance. A joint French-British thrust toward Ghent ran into Falkenhayn’s main force and was thrown back. The Germans tried to tear through the Belgian line at the Yser, but they too were stopped. Thus was set in motion the month of carnage called the First Battle of Ypres.

At one of the villages, Wytschaete, there was hard fighting a day after the opening of the dikes. A unit of Bavarians had tried to take Wytschaete and failed, and in the aftermath of the attack a captain named Hoffman lay badly wounded between his troops and the French defenders. One of Hoffman’s men moved out of a protected position and, under enemy fire, picked him up and carried him to safety. The rescue accomplished nothing—the captain soon died of his wounds. But his rescuer would claim years later, in a notorious book, that his escape without a scratch was his first intimation that he was being spared for some great future. In the nearer term he was decorated for bravery. It was just a few days after Adolf Hitler’s exploit that Kaiser Wilhelm pinned the Iron Cross Second Class on his tunic.

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.

Even after the last assault at Ypres, the Western Front was never entirely quiet.

A new reality facing all the combatants was Turkey’s entry into the war—a strange and unnecessary development. Backward and corrupt, economically and militarily feeble, the Ottoman Empire of 1914 was in no position to compete effectively with the great powers of Europe or even to function as a true partner of any of them.

Yet somehow these men were supposed to work together to save their country from destruction. The prospects were not encouraging. “I can only love and hate, and I hate General Falkenhayn,” Ludendorff declared.

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

For the first time in history, and from the beginning of the war to the end, artillery dominated. It did more killing between 1914 and 1918 than any other weapon.

Even the rifles carried by the soldiers of the Great War were astonishing weapons in comparison with anything previously available. They varied little from country to country: the German Mauser, French Lebel, British Lee-Enfield, Austrian Männlicher, and Italian Männlicher-Carcano all were about four feet long, weighed less than ten pounds,

Simpler innovations, some of them almost crude in technological terms, also proved to be important. Barbed wire, developed in the United States to keep cattle from breaking through fences, became an essential.

Poison gas, introduced by the Germans early in 1915 and thereafter used by both sides, killed thousands and left thousands disabled. It was “improved” as the war went on, chlorine being succeeded by phosgene and phosgene by mustard, but it never produced or even contributed significantly to a major victory on any front. Its deficiencies came to be so universally recognized that not even the Nazis would use it in World War II.