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

by G.J. Meyer

Most dramatically, the Great War brought the end of cavalry. Mounted soldiers had been a central element in offensive warfare since before the time of Alexander the Great. As a way of delivering a decisive shock to an enemy, they dominated European battlefields from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. All the armies that went to war in 1914 included huge numbers of troops on horseback—the Russians put more than a million in the field, many of them Cossacks—despite the fact that the decline in their value had begun to be apparent as early as the Civil War.

On February 19, when Carden steamed up to the entry to the strait and began shelling the forts there, he had under his command the most potent fleet ever assembled in that part of the world.

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.)

In a short war, one in which the Schlieffen Plan succeeded and was followed by the defeat of Russia, the United Kingdom’s great navy would have mattered even less than its little prewar army. But in the siege that the Western Front became, all the combatant powers desperately needed access to the outside world. Few of them, the island nation of Britain least of all, produced enough food to support their populations. None could keep their war machines in operation without imported raw materials.

But when Wilhelm II and Tirpitz embarked upon the building of a navy that they hoped to make as powerful as Britain’s, they threatened the foundations of British security. From the perspective of London, Germany was no longer a friend but a rival at best and a serious danger at worst. (The kaiser neither intended nor foresaw this change. At once jealous and admiring of a United Kingdom ruled in succession by his grandmother, his uncle, and his cousin, he entertained fantasies in which Britain would embrace Germany as its equal on a world stage that the two would govern to the benefit of everyone, including the “natives” of backward and faraway lands.)

On November 1 five German cruisers commanded by Admiral Maximilian von Spee met and defeated the Royal Navy’s South American squadron off the coast of Chile, sinking two cruisers and badly damaging a third.

On February 4, though they had fewer than twenty seaworthy submarines (Britain and France each had more, Fisher having insisted on adding them to the Royal Navy during his first tenure as sea lord),

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

At its peak their campaign was stopping less than four percent of British traffic but was arousing a ferociously negative response not only in Britain but in the United States. The German foreign office, fearful of American intervention, tried to persuade the kaiser that the U-boats’ successes were not nearly worth the risk.

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.

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.

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.

From now on all the armies of the Great War would expect gas and be more or less prepared for it. And though both sides would use it extensively, never again would it disable enough men to decide the outcome of a battle. Even at Ypres the British and French needed only hours to understand what they were faced with and find ways to deal with it. First it was noticed that the brass buttons on the soldiers’ uniforms had turned green. Someone deduced from this phenomenon that the mysterious cloud must be chlorine and knew of a quick preventive: by breathing through a cloth on which they had urinated (a spare sock, for example), the troops could neutralize the poison before it reached their lungs. The first improvised gas masks thus emerged almost immediately after the first use of chlorine.

The trenches were less often straight than broken by dogleg turns, so that any enemy troops who got into them would have a limited field of fire.

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.”

But in fact it was artillery that dominated the battlefields. World War I was the first major war, and it would also be the last, in which more men were killed by artillery than by small arms or aerial bombardment or any other method of destruction.

much of what was delivered piled up uselessly at Russia’s only functioning (and woefully inadequate) ports of entry, Vladivostok at the eastern end of Siberia and Archangel in the Arctic.

The Germans had used more ammunition in the Battle of the Marne than in the Franco-Prussian War;

The fact that not a single offensive on the Western Front had achieved its intended results reinforced the kaiser’s belief that victory could be achieved only in the east.

The government was dissolved and replaced with a coalition cabinet—the first wartime coalition in British history. Asquith held on to his job, but Conservative members became a major element in the cabinet and Lloyd George was the leader of the surviving Liberals.

The Conservatives had old scores to settle with Churchill, who a decade earlier had deserted them to join the Liberals.

It is estimated that more than half a million Armenians were killed in 1915, and that was far from the end of it. The massacre would continue through 1916, with further death marches in Syria.

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.”

Successive Turkish governments continued into the twenty-first century not only to deny that an Armenian genocide ever occurred but to prosecute any Turk who dared to write of it.

All through that first day the troops ashore were marched back and forth in confusion, their officers having been given no clear instructions as to what they were supposed to do.

The Russian general staff was so alarmed by the rate at which its men were surrendering that it issued draconian decrees. Families of soldiers taken prisoner would receive no government assistance. Soldiers who surrendered would be sent to Siberia after the war.

His fears were eased though not ended when, in the closing days of August, Tsar Nicholas removed Grand Duke Nicholas as head of the Russian armies and, to the entirely appropriate horror of his ministers, appointed himself to the position.

His spirits had begun to lift when it was decided to precede the attack with a release of chlorine. He was so encouraged by this idea that he had a tower constructed from which to observe his troops as they rolled over the German defenses.

Our instructions had been that at the conclusion of the parade we were to put our caps on the points of our fixed bayonets and wave and cheer. So that’s what we did—‘Hip, hip, hooray.’ Well, the King’s horse reared and he fell off. He just seemed to slide off and so of course the second ‘Hip, hip’ fizzled out. It was quite a fiasco and you should have seen the confusion as these other high-ranking officers rushed to dismount and go to the King’s assistance.

Thirty-six hours after this mutiny, the last Australian troops on Gallipoli were carried safely off to sea and it was all over. The campaign had taken the lives of at least eighty-seven thousand Turks. (That is the official number, but it is widely regarded as too low.) Forty-six thousand British, French, Australians, and New Zealanders had either been killed or died of wounds or disease. Total casualties on both sides were in the neighborhood of half a million.

And so began the Battle of Verdun, the longest battle of the Great War and one of the most terrible ever fought.

When the quarreling grandsons of Charlemagne met in 843 to divide the Frankish empire, they did so at Verdun. Their agreement, the Treaty of Verdun, created three new realms. In the west was the Kingdom of the West Franks, which would evolve over the centuries into France. The Kingdom of the East Franks became Germany (and gradually broke into hundreds of fragments). Between the two was a long and vulnerable strip-kingdom, called Lotharingia (the root of the name Lorraine) for the unfortunate grandson, Lothair, who received it as his share. It ran from what is now Holland south through the old kingdom of Alsatia (thus Alsace) all the way to Rome. It became a battleground between its neighbors and soon disappeared from history.

But by the sixteenth century the balance of power had shifted. France was centralizing under the king at Paris and growing stronger, while the Holy Roman Empire was almost too fractured to defend itself. Verdun was plucked away by Henry II of France. In the seventeenth century Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIV, seized Alsace and Lorraine as well, shifting the border between France and Germany eastward to the Rhine.

Thus did Germany, through its own actions, lose Alsace and Lorraine long before France took them back.

Three-fifths of the troops with which the French began the battle became casualties within two weeks.

Meanwhile not everything was going well for the Germans. For reasons that will never be known because every witness was instantly reduced to his constituent molecules, an enormous German ammunition dump at the village of Spincourt suddenly blew up. Four hundred and fifty thousand shells disappeared in an explosion that seemed to rend the heavens, leaving the Germans instantly and gravely short of ammunition.

At the peak of the conflict, trucks arrived in Verdun at a rate of one every fourteen seconds.

Any vehicle that broke down was rolled into the ditches that lined the road, and at any given time as many as fifteen thousand men were at work keeping the roadbed in usable condition.

And so the Germans, having in the space of a week thrown away two opportunities to capture Verdun, cast aside the chance to get out cheaply.

An early favorite was that the soldiers’ nervous systems were being damaged in some mysterious way by shock waves from high explosives. Thus the term shell shock came into general, even diagnostic, use.

Twelve thousand unwounded Russians, still flimsily dressed after a year and a half of war, froze to death when temperatures plunged overnight.

In the far South Atlantic the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton arrived at a whaling station on South Georgia Island at the end of a horrendous year and a half stranded with his men amid the ice floes fringing the Antarctic continent. It had been 1914, the fighting in its earliest stages, when Shackleton lost contact with the outside world. “Tell me,” he asked the first man he encountered. “When was the war over?” “The war is not over,” he was told. “Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”

It did not even give birth to combat aviation; the Italians had used nine primitive airplanes in snatching Libya away from the Ottoman Empire in 1911 and 1912.

The Great War did give birth to the tank, which would not have been invented nearly as early as it was if not for the stalemate on the Western Front.

In 1915 Zeppelin raids over southern England became almost commonplace, killing and wounding hundreds.

February 1916 brought the first sinking of a ship, a British merchantman, by bombardment from the air.

After another month, dissatisfied with the pace at which the war ministry was proceeding, Churchill assembled his own design team and funded it out of the Royal Navy’s budget. By the time he was replaced as First Lord of the Admiralty, contracts had been let for the construction of eighteen prototype “landships.”

Anticipating the questions that would be provoked by huge, strangely shaped objects concealed under tarpaulins, officials at the war office decided to say that they were special water carriers—mobile tanks—bound for Russia. That was the name that stuck.

The Germans’ nightmare deepened on May 8, before anyone had an opportunity to celebrate the conquest of Côte 304, when Fort Douaumont suddenly blew up.