Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Introduction

  1914 Chronology

  The Organisation of Armies in 1914

  Prologue: SARAJEVO

  1. ‘A Feeling that Events are in the Air’

  1. CHANGE AND DECAY

  2. BATTLE PLANS

  2. The Descent to War

  1. THE AUSTRIANS THREATEN

  2. THE RUSSIANS REACT

  3. THE GERMANS MARCH

  4. THE BRITISH DECIDE

  3. ‘The Superb Spectacle of the World Bursting Into Flames’

  1. MIGRATIONS

  2. PASSIONS

  3. DEPARTURES

  4. Disaster on the Drina

  5. Death with Flags and Trumpets

  1. THE EXECUTION OF PLAN XVII

  2. ‘GERMAN BEASTLINESS’

  3. LANREZAC ENCOUNTERS SCHLIEFFEN

  6. The British Fight

  1. MONS

  2. LE CATEAU: ‘WHERE THE FUN COMES IN, I DON’T KNOW’

  7. The Retreat

  8. Tannenberg: ‘Alas, How Many Thousands Lie There Bleeding!’

  9. The Hour of Joffre

  1. PARIS AT BAY

  2. SIR JOHN DESPAIRS

  3. SEEDS OF HOPE

  10. The Nemesis of Moltke

  1. THE MARNE

  2. ‘STALEMATE IN OUR FAVOUR’

  11. ‘Poor Devils, They Fought Their Ships Like Men’

  12. Three Armies in Poland

  13. ‘Did You Ever Dance With Him?

  1. HOME FRONTS

  2. NEWS AND ABUSE

  14. Open Country, Open Sky

  1. CHURCHILL’S ADVENTURE

  2. ‘INVENTIONS OF THE DEVIL’

  15. Ypres: ‘Something that was Completely Hopeless’

  16. ‘War Becomes the Scourge of Mankind’

  1. POLAND

  2. THE SERBS’ LAST TRIUMPH

  17. Mudlife

  18. Silent Night, Holy Night

  Picture Section

  Footnotes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Notes and References

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Illustrations

  Images of the campaigns of 1914 are rare. Those professing to portray combat are often posed or faked, and many contemporary captions are wilfully or accidentally inaccurate. The pictures in this book have been chosen with these realities in mind, to give the most vivid possible impression of what the battlefields looked like, while recognising that few can be appropriately placed and dated, while some predate the war.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II (Popperfoto/Getty Images)

  Poincaré and the Tsar, St Petersburg, July 1914 (© Interfoto/Alamy).

  Asquith and Lloyd George (Private collection)

  Pasic (Imagno/Getty Images); Berchtold (akg/Imagno); Sazonov (© RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts); Grey (Hulton Archive/Getty Images); Churchill (Hulton Archive/Getty Images); Bethmann Hollweg (DPA/Press Association Images).

  Russians solicit divine assistance (Mirrorpix)

  Moltke (The Granger Collection/Topfoto); Ludendorff (Hulton Archive/Getty Images); Hindenburg (Hulton Archive/Getty Images); Kitchener (Hulton Archive/Getty Images); Lanrezac (Mary Evans/Epic/Tallandier)

  Conrad (© Ullsteinbild/Topfoto); Joffre (© Roger Viollet/Topfoto); French (© Roger Viollet/Topfoto); Haig (© Roger Viollet/Topfoto); Falkenhayn (Hulton Archive/Getty Images); Franchet d’Espèrey (DeAgostini/Getty Images).

  Russians in Galicia (Mirrorpix).

  Serbian troops advance (© Robert Hunt Library/Mary Evans).

  Putnik (© The Art Archive/Alamy);

  Potiorek (Getty Images).

  Corporal Egon Kisch (© IMAGNO/Lebrecht);

  Austrian troops conduct a mass execution of Serbian civilians (© Robert Hunt Library/Mary Evans).

  An Austrian siege piece (Photo12/Ann Ronan Picture Library);

  Kluck (akg-images);

  Bülow (© INTERFOTO/Alamy).

  French troops, before the deluge (© Roger-Viollet/Topfoto).

  Belgians in action (Underwood Archives/Getty Images)

  The legendary French soixante-quinzes (Roger-Viollet/Rex Features).

  Smith-Dorrien (Mirropix)

  Wilson, Foch and Huguet (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  Murray (Universal History Archive/UIG/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Germans advance (RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts)

  Frenchmen display offensive spirit (Mirrorpix).

  Austro-Hungarian cavalry in Galicia (© Robert Hunt Library/Mary Evans

  The British deploy on their first battlefield (© IWM (Q 53319))

  British troops await the enemy.

  Samsonov (DeAgostini/GettyImages)

  Russians under attack.

  Russian prisoners after Tannenberg (© Robert Hunt Library/Mary Evans).

  Rennenkampf (RIA Novosti).

  Fortunino Matania’s painting of L Battery’s action at Néry (© David Cohen Fine Art/Mary Evans Picture Library).

  The Middlesex under fire (R.C. Money. LC GS 1126. Reproduced with the permission of Leeds University Library)

  A Suffolk girl at the handle of a Lowestoft tram (© IWM (Q 31032)

  Russian soldiers in bivouac (David King Collection)

  A Russian field hospital (David King Collection).

  The Western Front, winter 1914 (© SZ Photo/Scherl/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Dorothie Feilding (Warwickshire County Record Office collections: CR2017/F246/326); Edouard Cœurdevey (Personal archives of Jean Cœurdevey); Jacques Rivière (All rights reserved. Private collection); Richard Hentsch (bpk/Studio Niermann/Emil Bieber); Paul Lintier (From Avec une batterie de 75. Le Tube 1233. Souvenirs d’un chef de pièce (1915–1916) by Paul Lintier, Paris 1917); Vladimir Littauer (From Russian Hussar by Vladimir S. Littauer, J.A. Allen & Co., London, 1965); Constantin Schneider (Constantin Schneider als Oberleutnant; Foto: Privatbesitz; Reproduktion: Salzburger Landesarchiv; aus: Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Neuere Geschichte Österreichs, Bd. 95, Wien [u.a.] Böhlau, 2003); Lionel Tennyson (Tennyson Research Centre, Lincolnshire County Council); Venetia Stanley (© Illustrated London News Ltd/ Mary Evans); Louis Spears (Patrick Aylmer); Helene Schweida and Wilhelm Kaisen (State Archive of Bremen); Louis Barthas (From Les Carnets de guerre de Louis Barthas, tonnelier, 1914–1918 © Editions de la Découverte. Paris. English edition to be published in 2013 by Yale University Press); François Mayer (© IWM Q 111149)

  A family flees a battlefield (Mirrorpix)

  British soldiers in Belgium, winter 1914 (K.W. Brewster/The Liddle Collection/Leeds University Library. Photograph LC GS 0195)

  While every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of photographs, in some cases this has not proved possible. The author and publishers would welcome any information that would enable such omissions to be rectified in future editions.

  Maps

  Author’s note: The movements of the vast armies in 1914 were so complex that it is impossible to depict them cartographically in detail. In these maps I have striven for clarity for non-specialist readers, for instance by omitting divisional numbers except where essential. They are generally based upon the maps in Arthur Banks’s A Military Atlas of the First World War (Heinemann, 1975).

  Rival concentrations on the Western Front, August 1914

  Serbia, 1914

  Frontier battles in Lorraine, 10–28 August 1914

  The German advance throu
gh Belgium, August 1914

  The Battle of Mons, 23 August 1914

  The British at Le Cateau, 26 August 1914

  The allied retirement, 23 August–6 September 1914

  A View of the Eastern Front

  The Russian advance into East Prussia

  The Battle of Tannenberg, 24–29 August 1914: the pre-battle situation

  The Battle of Tannenberg: the final act

  German advance, 17 August–5 September 1914

  The Battle of the Marne, 5–6 September 1914

  The Battle of the Marne, 7–8 September 1914

  The Battle of the Marne, 9 September 1914

  The German armies in retreat towards the Aisne

  The Galician theatre

  The allied withdrawal to the Yser–Lys position, 9–15 October 1914

  The First Battle of Ypres: the first moves

  The First Battle of Ypres: final positions

  Approximate positions on the Eastern and Western Fronts, December 1914

  As commandant of the British Army’s staff college in 1910, Brigadier-General Henry Wilson asserted the likelihood of a European war, and argued that Britain’s only prudent option was to ally itself with France against the Germans. A student ventured to argue, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen’ could precipitate a general conflagration. This provoked Wilson’s derision: ‘Haw! Haw! Haw!!! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you’re going to get.’

  ‘We are readying ourselves to enter a long tunnel full of blood and darkness’ ANDRÉ GIDE, 28 July 1914

  A bantering Russian foreign ministry official said to the British military attaché on 16 August: ‘You soldiers ought to be very pleased that we have arranged such a nice war for you.’ The officer answered: ‘We must wait and see whether it will be such a nice war after all.’

  Introduction

  Winston Churchill wrote afterwards: ‘No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening. The measured, silent drawing together of gigantic forces, the uncertainty of their movements and positions, the number of unknown and unknowable facts made the first collision a drama never surpassed. Nor was there any other period in the War when the general battle was waged on so great a scale, when the slaughter was so swift or the stakes so high. Moreover, in the beginning our faculties of wonder, horror and excitement had not been cauterized and deadened by the furnace fires of years.’ All this was so, though few of Churchill’s fellow participants in those vast events embraced them with such eager appetite.

  In our own twenty-first century, the popular vision of the war is dominated by images of trenches, mud, wire and poets. It is widely supposed that the first day of the 1916 Battle of the Somme was the bloodiest of the entire conflict. This is not so. In August 1914 the French army, advancing under brilliant sunshine across a virgin pastoral landscape, in dense masses clad in blue overcoats and red trousers, led by officers riding chargers, with colours flying and bands playing, fought battles utterly unlike those that came later, and at even more terrible daily cost. Though French losses are disputed, the best estimates suggest that they suffered well over a million casualtiesfn1 in 1914’s five months of war, including 329,000 dead. One soldier whose company entered its first battle with eighty-two men had just three left alive and unwounded by the end of August.

  The Germans suffered 800,000 casualties in the same period, including three times as many dead as during the entire Franco-Prussian War. This also represented a higher rate of loss than at any later period of the war. The British in August fought two actions, at Mons and Le Cateau, which entered their national legend. In October their small force was plunged into the three-week nightmare of the First Battle of Ypres. The line was narrowly held, with a larger French and Belgian contribution than chauvinists acknowledge, but much of the old British Army reposes forever in the region’s cemeteries: four times as many soldiers of the King perished in 1914 as during the three years of the Boer War. Meanwhile in the East, within weeks of abandoning their harvest fields, shops and lathes, newly mobilised Russian, Austrian and German soldiers met in huge clashes; tiny Serbia inflicted a succession of defeats on the Austrians which left the Hapsburg Empire reeling, having by Christmas suffered 1.27 million casualties at Serb and Russian hands, amounting to one in three of its soldiers mobilised.

  Many books about 1914 confine themselves either to describing the political and diplomatic maelstrom from which the armies flooded forth in August, or to providing a military narrative. I have attempted to draw together these strands, to offer readers some answers, at least, to the enormous question: ‘What happened to Europe in 1914?’ Early chapters describe how the war began. Thereafter, I have traced what followed on the battlefields and behind them until, as winter closed in, the struggle lapsed into stalemate, and attained the military character that it retained, in large measure, until the last phase in 1918. Christmas 1914 is an arbitrary point of closure, but I would cite Winston Churchill’s remarks above, arguing that the opening phase of the conflict had a unique character which justifies examining it in isolation. My concluding chapter offers some wider reflections.

  The outbreak has been justly described as the most complex series of happenings in history, much more difficult to comprehend and explain than the Russian Revolution, the onset of World War II or the Cuban missile crisis. This part of the story is inevitably that of the statesmen and generals who willed it, of the rival manoeuvres of the Triple Alliance – Germany and Austria-Hungary with Italy as a non-playing member – against the Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain.

  In today’s Britain, there is a widespread belief that the war was so horrendous that the merits of the rival belligerents’ causes scarcely matter – the Blackadder take on history, if you like. This seems mistaken, even if one does not entirely share Cicero’s view that the causes of events are more important than the events themselves. That wise historian Kenneth O. Morgan, neither a conservative nor a revisionist, delivered a 1996 lecture about the cultural legacy of the twentieth century’s two global disasters, in which he argued that ‘the history of the First World War was hijacked in the 1920s by the critics’. Foremost among these was Maynard Keynes, an impassioned German sympathiser who castigated the supposed injustice and folly of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, without offering a moment’s speculation about what sort of peace Europe would have had if a victorious Kaiserreich and its allies had been making it. The contrast is striking, and wildly overdone, between the revulsion of the British people following World War I, and their triumphalism after 1945. I am among those who reject the notion that the conflict of 1914–18 belonged to a different moral order from that of 1939–45. If Britain had stood aside while the Central Powers prevailed on the continent, its interests would have been directly threatened by a Germany whose appetite for dominance would assuredly have been enlarged by victory.

  The seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey wrote: ‘About 1647, I went to see Parson Stump out of curiosity to see his Manuscripts, whereof I had seen some in my childhood; but by that time they were lost and disperst; his sons were gunners and souldiers, and scoured their gunnes with them.’ All historians face such disappointments, but the contrary phenomenon also afflicts students of 1914: there is an embarrassment of material in many languages, and much of it is suspect or downright corrupt. Almost all the leading actors in varying degree falsified the record about their own roles; much archival material was destroyed, not merely by carelessness but often because it was deemed injurious to the reputations of nations or individuals. From 1919 onwards Germany’s leaders, in pursuit of political advantage, strove to shape a record that might exonerate their country from war guilt, systematically eliminating embarrassing evidence. Some Serbs, Russians and Frenchmen did likewise.

  Moreover, because so many statesmen and soldiers changed their minds several times during the years preceding 1914, their public and private words can be deployed to support a wide range of alternative judgements abo
ut their convictions and intentions. An academic once described oceanography as ‘a creative activity undertaken by individuals who are … gratifying their own curiosity. They are trying to find meaningful patterns in the research data, their own as well as other people’s, and far more frequently than one might suppose, the interpretation is frankly speculative.’ The same is true about the study of history in general, and that of 1914 in particular.

  Scholarly argument about responsibility for the war has raged through decades and several distinct phases. A view gained acceptance in the 1920s and thereafter, influenced by a widespread belief that the 1919 Versailles Treaty imposed unduly harsh terms upon Germany, that all the European powers shared blame. Then Luigi Albertini’s seminal work The Origins of the War of 1914 appeared in Italy in 1942 and in Britain in 1953, laying the foundations for many subsequent studies, especially in its emphasis on German responsibility. In 1961 Fritz Fischer published another ground-breaking book, Germany’s War Aims in the First World War, arguing that the Kaiserreich must bear the burden of guilt, because documentary evidence showed the country’s leadership bent upon launching a European war before Russia’s accelerating development and armament precipitated a seismic shift in strategic advantage.

  At first, Fischer’s compatriots responded with outrage. They were members of the generation which reluctantly accepted a necessity to shoulder responsibility for the Second World War; now, here was Fischer insisting that his own nation should also bear the guilt for the First. It was too much, and his academic brethren fell upon him. The bitterness of Germany’s ‘Fischer controversy’ has never been matched by any comparable historical debate in Britain or the United States. When the dust settled, however, a remarkable consensus emerged that, with nuanced reservations, Fischer was right.

  But in the past three decades, different aspects of his thesis have been energetically challenged by writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Among the most impressive contributions was that of Georges-Henri Soutou, in his 1989 work L’Or et le sang. Soutou did not address the causes of the conflict, but instead the rival war aims of the allies and the Central Powers, convincingly showing that rather than entering the conflict with a coherent plan for world domination, the Germans made up their objectives as they went along. Some other historians have ploughed more contentious furrows. Sean McMeekin wrote in 2011: ‘The war of 1914 was Russia’s war even more than it was Germany’s.’ Samuel Williamson told a March 2012 seminar at Washington’s Wilson Center that the theory of explicit German guilt is no longer tenable. Niall Ferguson places a heavy responsibility on British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey. Christopher Clark argues that Austria was entitled to exact military retribution for the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand upon Serbia, which was effectively a rogue state. Meanwhile John Rohl, magisterial historian of the Kaiser and his court, remains unwavering in his view that there was ‘crucial evidence of intentionality on Germany’s part’.