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Chapter One Origins of “The Great War”

The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. —Remark attributed to Sir Edward Grey, British foreign secretary, on the eve of World War I

uring the early twentieth century, optimism and confidence about the future course of humankind was rising across much of the world. DIndustrialization and international trade had lifted many economies to new heights of productivity and prosperity. In addition, advances in scientific knowledge, political reforms, and exciting new artistic and cultural movements captured the imaginations of people in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. All of this forward momentum, however, came to a screech- ing halt in the days and weeks following the June 28, 1914, assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Serbia.

Tangled Alliances and Jealousies Drag Europe into War The political ripple effects of that murder committed by Gavrilo Princip on the streets of the Serbian capital of Sarajevo overwhelmed the close economic ties that European nations had forged with each other. The ethnic tensions and national anxieties awoken by the assassination even proved more powerful than the blood ties that linked Europe’s many monarchies. King George V of Britain and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany were cousins who traced their lineage directly from Britain’s Queen Victoria, their grandmother. Another of Victoria’s grandchildren was Alexandra, the strong-willed wife of Tsar Nicholas II of Rus- sia. In the end, though, these extended family relations proved to be of no help in dispersing the gathering storm clouds of war.

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Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, one hour before they were assassinated on the streets of Sarajevo.

The chain reaction of events that transformed the death of a single man into a global war was set in motion by Austria-Hungary, often known simply as Aus- tria. The Austrian government had long struggled to keep the empire’s many nationalities, languages, and religions from pulling the country apart. The Aus- trians saw the identity of the assassin—an ethnic Serbian who wanted all Serb territory in Austria to be united with the adjacent nation of Serbia—as a dangerous threat to its fragile national unity. After the archduke’s death, Austria handed the government of Serbia a list of ten demands, any one of which would have erod- ed Serbia’s independence. For example, Austria insisted that Serbia outlaw any criticisms of the Austrian monarchy in newspapers, schoolbooks, and govern- mental statements. It also demanded that Serbia arrest or fire a long list of officials and military officers it regarded as unfriendly to the Hapsburg Monarchy. When Serbia refused to knuckle under to Austria’s ultimatums, Austria declared war against its neighbor on July 28. It took this stance with the support of Germany, Austria’s chief military ally in Europe (see “Starting Down the

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Path to War,” p. 159). Germany, which was led by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (see biography, p. 150), was a young but strong and con- fident nation. Though the nation had only formally been forged into existence by a union of Germanic states in 1871—less than a half century earlier—its leaders were convinced that the country was destined for great things. Since its founding Germany had built a thriving industrial economy and formidable army. It had even managed to establish a few overseas colonies in places overlooked by France and Great Britain, the world’s great colonial empires. Serbia could never have withstood an invasion by the German-backed Austrian military on its own. But the people of Serbia shared the same Slavic ethnic background as the people of the vast nation of Russia to the east. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia expressed These ethnic bonds caused Russia to adopt a grave doubts about going to war against Germany. very protective stance toward Serbia. The Rus- sians were also anxious about the growing might of Germany, which loomed on Russia’s far western border. These considerations led Russia to announce mobilization of its armed forces. This was a clear sign that if Austria invaded Serbia, Russia would rush to Serbia’s defense. From this point forward the momentum for war among Europe’s greatest powers—the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy (first forged in 1882) and the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia (established in 1907)—picked up ever greater speed. Russia had hoped that partial mobilization would scare Austria into reconsidering its threat to invade Serbia. Instead, it sparked a stern warning from Germany that continued Russian mobilization would force the Germans to ready their own forces for war. In late July Nicholas II (see biography, p. 141) and Wilhelm II exchanged a frantic series of messages urging each other to rein in their restless generals, many of whom were itching for a war. The efforts of the two monarchs failed, though, and when Germany ordered a partial mobilization of its army, Nicholas II approved a full mobilization of the Russian military. He was horribly depressed about this turn of events, however. “Think of the responsibility which

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you are asking me to take!” he exclaimed to his foreign minister. “Think of the thousands and thousands of men who will be sent to their death!”1 The rising tensions between Germany and Russia also ensnared France, which had established a military alliance with Russia. The French still remembered how they had been forced to give Germany large tracts of valuable territory—the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine—in the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War that had created Germany. This humiliating blow continued to color French attitudes toward Germany in the 1910s. They saw the Germans’ bel- ligerent stance toward Russia as a clear sign of German arrogance and contempt for other peoples of Europe. French president Raymond Poincaré and other leaders approved mobilization of the nation’s armed forces to show that France would stand by Russia.

Germany’s Plan of Conquest The mobilizations ordered by Russia and France so angered and alarmed Germany that it declared war against both nations, on August 1 and August 3, respectively. Kaiser Wilhelm II expressed confidence that both the French and Russian capitals would be in German hands before the year was out. He pro- claimed, in fact, that he would have Paris for lunch and St. Petersburg for dinner. Wilhelm’s boast provided a glimpse into Germany’s military strategy for the upcoming war. The generals of Germany recognized that waging a “two-front war”—one with simultaneous fighting on both their eastern and western bor- ders—would be very difficult. With that in mind, the Germans launched a military plan designed to quickly neutralize the threat on their western front— France—before Russia fully mobilized. They could then shift all their attention to Russia on Germany’s eastern front. This strategy was known by Germany’s high commanders as the Schleiffen Plan. Germany demanded permission from neighboring Belgium to take its army through the Belgian countryside and march on Paris out of the north. When Bel- gium, which was trying to stay neutral in the spreading conflict, denied Ger- many’s request for passage, the Germans responded by declaring war against the Belgians. This declaration of war came on August 4, the same day that German troops began pouring across the lightly defended Belgian border. Germany’s invasion of Belgium was too much for Great Britain to bear. The leaders of Britain had hoped to avoid being pulled into the war, despite the fact that it had military “ententes”—agreements or understandings—with Russia

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The Fate of the Archduke’s Assassin

avrilo Princip, the Serbian man Gwho murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife and set in motion the events that would lead to World War I, never intended to be captured alive. The revolutionaries who devised the assassination plot had even given Princip and the other participants in the murder scheme vials of a poison called cyanide, which they were to take immediately after they carried out their mission. After shooting the archduke and his wife, Princip swallowed the cyanide as instructed. He vomited the poison up, however. Princip then tried to shoot himself in the head, but he was grabbed and disarmed by bystanders before he could pull the trigger. Ultimately, Princip and seven other conspirators were tried and convicted of treason and murder. Assassin Gavrilo Princip. Three members of the assassination plot were executed for their crimes, but Princip and three others were spared execution because they were under the age of twenty when Ferdinand and his wife were killed. Under Austro-Hungarian law, capital punishment could not be imposed on anyone who was a teen at the time of their offense. Princip was subsequently sen- tenced to twenty years in prison—the maximum sentence allowed by state law—but he died only four years later, on April 28, 1918, of tuberculosis. By all accounts, Princip remained proud of his actions—and untroubled by the worldwide misery he sparked—until the day he died.

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and France. On August 1, for example, Britain’s King George V sent a telegraph to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, stating that “I cannot help thinking that some misunderstanding has pro- duced this deadlock. I am most anxious not to miss any possibility of avoiding the terrible calamity which at present threatens the whole world.”2 The British, though, viewed the march of Germans into Belgium as a mortal threat to their own security. If Germany took control of Belgium’s harbors on the English Channel, the body of water that separates Great Britain from mainland Europe, it would possess ideal launching points for a naval invasion of Eng- land. Besides, Britain felt duty-bound to honor the terms of an 1831 treaty with Belgium that promised British military aid if Belgium’s independence and neutrality were ever jeopardized Kaiser Wilhelm II worked relentlessly to rally the German people for war. (see “On the Eve of War,” p. 160). On August 6 Britain formally declared war on Germany and began mobilizing its own forces, including its formidable fleet of battleships. Anoth- er flurry of declarations of war then ensued between the pre-war Triple Entente and Austria-Hungary, which had set the whole crisis in motion. By the time this fresh barrage of war proclamations concluded, however, it was clear that the assassination of Austria’s archduke had almost been forgotten. The armies that were gathering all across Europe were now motivated by a powerful mix of patriotism, ethnic suspicions, and genuine concern for their nations’ well-being. Government officials, soldiers, and civilians in these countries all had wild- ly different perspectives on why Europe was hurtling toward war. The old Triple Entente powers of Britain, France, and Russia—now known as the Allied Pow- ers—attributed the crisis to German and Austrian aggression and ruthlessness. Germany, however, believed that the nations lining up against them were jeal- ous of their nation’s growing power and influence. “A fateful hour has fallen upon Germany,” declared the Kaiser in a July 31 speech from his palace balcony to a raucous throng of thousands. “Envious people on all sides are compelling us to resort to a just defense. The sword is being forced into our hands.… I com-

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mand you all to go to church, kneel before God and pray to Him to help our gallant army.”3 In the end, say scholars, emotions became so stirred up that the drive to war took on its own fearsome momentum. “Many people think that they know what [the war] is ‘really’ about, believe they have discovered the ‘true cause,’ but this ‘really’ and ‘true cause’ have already disappeared behind the fact that they are at war,” wrote historian Peter Englund in 2011. “The war already shows signs of becoming an end in itself and few people are still talking about Sarajevo.”4 And once the push for war gathered speed, no one seemed to have any idea how to slow it. “No one in particular wants [war], and then all at once there it is,” stat- ed a character in the famous World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front, written by German war veteran Erich Maria Remarque. “We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing—and yet half the world is in it all the same.”5

Girding for War In late summer 1914 patriotic young men swarmed into military recruit- ing stations all across Europe. In Britain alone, nearly a million volunteers enlisted in the royal army or navy by the end of the year. German, Austrian, French, Russian, and British factories, offices, and farms replaced these depart- ed men with women who were both eager to support the war effort and des- perate to keep their family’s finances afloat in the absence of their husbands, fathers, and brothers. Soldiers also came to Europe from distant lands. British subjects from colonies in Australia, Canada, India, Newfoundland, New Zealand, and South Africa all rushed to the war zone, as did troops from France’s far-flung African colonies. Meanwhile, armed conflict flared all across the globe as nations picked sides in the unfurling war. Japan declared war on Germany on August 23 and quickly captured small German outposts in the Pacific and China. Two months later, the Turkish Ottoman Empire—better known as Turkey—entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria. Turkey’s entrance expanded the war into the heart of the Middle East. Meanwhile, German forces launched attacks against French and British colonies in South Africa, while Allied troops invaded the German protectorate of Togoland, in western Africa. Back in Europe, the mood was strangely celebratory in many towns and cities. Patriotic feelings soared, especially as newspapers and radio programs trumpeted propaganda accusing enemy governments and troops of evil inten-

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The British put together armies from all corners of its empire—including these troops from India.

tions, cruelty, and bloodthirstiness. “I remember very well the tremendous enthusiasm” when war broke out, recalled one German man who was a young- ster in 1914. “We schoolboys were all indoctrinated with great patriotism.… My father was an active infantry officer and I shall never forget the day when they marched out to the trains. All the soldiers were decorated with flowers, there was no gun which did not show a flower. Even the horses I think were decorated. And of course all the people followed them. Bands playing, flags fly- ing, a terrific sort of overwhelming conviction that Germany now would go into war and win it very quickly.”6 The same feelings rippled through the cities and villages of France, Rus- sia, and even Britain, which had joined the war with considerable reluctance. British secretary of state for war Lord Herbert Kitchener engineered a massively successful enlistment campaign across England that emphasized themes of patriotism and bravery. “As a young schoolgirl I remember there was great excitement in Sheffield when the posters went up showing Kitchener saying ‘We Want You’ and a number of our young men joined up,” remembered one Eng- lishwoman. “They … expected to be in uniform straight away and rush off to win the war, which of course everyone thought would be over by Christmas.”7

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Germany Repulses the Russians in the East The war on the Eastern Front began triumphantly for Germany. In late August German forces under the command of Field Marshal Paul von Hin- denburg and General Erich Ludendorff engaged with 150,000 Russian troops under the command of General Alexander Samsonov at Allenstein in the Ger- man province of East Prussia (now known as the city of Olstzyn in the country of Poland). This five-day battle, popularly known as the Battle of Tannen- berg, ended in catastrophic defeat for the Russians. All but Austria became so 10,000 troops under Samsonov’s command were killed, wounded, or captured in the clash, and tens of thousands of dependent on German Russian soldiers under other commands were lost as well, as military aid for were hundreds of valuable heavy artillery guns. The Ger- survival that Germany mans, by contrast, suffered only about 20,000 casualties. concluded that it had The wider Russian military suffered a shattering decline in morale in the battle’s aftermath. Samsonov was so devas- become “shackled tated by Tannenberg that he committed suicide, and Russian to a corpse.” authorities tried to hide the news of the defeat from their nation’s civilian populace. The immense size of the Russian army ensured its survival after Tannenberg, but it did not set foot on German soil again for the rest of the war. The Russian army had better success in Austria, capturing much of the province of Galicia in early September. The Russians suffered another 250,000 casualties here, but the Austrians were battered even more badly, losing more than 400,000 soldiers to death, wounds, or capture. This triumph kept the Russ- ian public, which had been badly shaken by Tannenberg, from turning deci- sively against the war in these early months of combat. Austria-Hungary also struggled against neighboring Serbia. Determined to punish the Serbs for their role in Ferdinand’s death and meddling in Austria’s internal affairs, the Austrian army invaded Serbia on several occasions. Each time, however, Serbian forces bloodied them so badly that they had to retreat back to their own territory. By late 1914 Austrian emperor Franz Joseph had seen his nation’s army diminished by half, as it suffered more than 950,000 casualties at Russian and Serbian hands. Austria’s floundering in the Great War’s early months made it heavily dependent on German military aid for survival. This development angered and frustrated Germany, which grimly concluded that it had become “shackled to a corpse.”8

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The Germans Roll Through Belgium Warfare in Europe’s Western Theatre began in early August. On August 2 Germany invaded and occupied the tiny nation of Luxembourg, which put up no resistance. One day later, the German army advanced into Belgium, where it encountered a vexing level of armed resistance from outnumbered but brave Belgians. The main symbol of Belgian resistance was the city of Liege, whose defenders put up a spirited fight for nearly two weeks. The German troops final- ly took the town on August 16, and four days later they seized the Belgian capital of Brussels to complete their occupation of the country. The extended battle for Liege, though, gave French and British forces in France valuable extra time to prepare for the coming German onslaught. The resistance at Liege also sparked a wave of cruel atrocities by German forces against the Belgian people. Troops set fire to villages and neighborhoods, creating thousands of refugees, and they executed hundreds of civilians. Ger- man soldiers also vandalized or destroyed important European cultural trea- sures. The town of Leuven, for example, was subjected to “three days of chaos and looting,” according to historian Russell Freedman. During this storm of vio-

Invading German troops on the streets of Antwerp, Belgium.

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lence, Freedman added, the Catholic University of Leuven’s “priceless library of medieval books and manuscripts were burned, more than a thousand build- ings were destroyed, 209 civilians were killed, and the rest of the population of some 40,000 was forcibly evacuated.”9 Historians assert that the Rape of Belgium, as the wave of atrocities came to be known among Allied nations, was triggered by a toxic combination of anger and fear among German commanders and troops. The delay in crossing Belgium to France, said German military scholar Wolfgang Mommsen, “created a sort of crisis amongst the German military authorities” that led to a series of ruthless orders. Meanwhile, added Mommsen, German soldiers “committed violent crimes against the civil population which they believed to be reprisals against civilian sniper fire … which had been largely, if not totally, imagined by the troops themselves.… That created this kind of hysteria that then led to quite a substantial amount of atrocities.”10

Stopping the German Advance on Paris French military strategists erroneously believed that the German advance through Belgium was a feint—a deceptive maneuver—meant to fool them into concentrating their forces on France’s northeast border with Belgium. Instead, France sent a large portion of its army across the German border further south, into the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. France’s desire to fly the French flag over these two long-lost provinces was strong, but German forces in the region shattered the invasion with a counterattack that used machine guns, artillery, and long-range rifle fire to deadly effect. The French were forced to withdraw to a series of established fortifications along the eastern fron- tier of France, and the two armies here soon settled into a stalemate. Meanwhile, further to the north, French military commanders belatedly recognized that the German offensive through Belgium posed a major threat. The huge German invasion force possessed fearsome firepower, and in mid-August it began pouring into northern France. As they moved deeper into enemy territory, German generals divided their force into two columns that steadily pushed back French forces commanded by Marshal Joseph Joffre and six divisions of the British Expeditionary Forces led by Sir John French (the British Expeditionary Forces or BEF was the name given to the British armies sent to the Western Front). These clashes stretched from August 14 to August 24. Known collectively as the Battle of the Frontiers, they went very badly for the Allies, who were out-

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gunned and outnumbered. By early September the Germans had advanced to within thirty miles of Paris, France’s capital and most beloved city. Their approach triggered a hasty exodus of the nation’s leading politicians and ministry officials by train to the city of Bordeaux, far to the south. According to one French civil ser- vant, these officials trampled one another “as if they were in a burning theatre”11 as they board- ed the trains bound for Bordeaux. At this point, however, the German advance faltered. The invading troops were weary from the exhausting pace of their advance, which had also taken the army far ahead of its supply lines. Sensing opportunity, Joffre ordered a final defense of Paris along the Marne River. The centerpiece of this stand was a fierce offensive that rammed straight into the General Ferdinand Foch led the successful gap between the two German columns. French defense of Paris at Marne. “Attack, whatever happens!” French general Ferdinand Foch commanded at one point. “The Germans are at the extreme limit of their efforts … Vic- tory will come to the side that outlasts the other!”12 The Battle of the Marne, which raged from September 5 to September 12, pitted more than one million French and British troops (in 39 French divisions and 6 British divisions) against 27 German divisions totaling about 1.4 million soldiers. By the time it was over, the week-long engagement had claimed about 500,000 total casualties—including more than 260,000 French and British losses. But the valiant defense of Paris succeeded. By September 9 the bloodied and supply-starved Germans were forced to initiate a grudging but steady retreat (see “France Celebrates Victory in the Battle of the Marne,” p. 162). By mid-September they had withdrawn northward all the way back to the banks of the Aisne River, about 70 miles from Paris.

Race to the Sea At this point, both the Germans and the joint French-British forces began dig- ging trenches and building other defensive fortifications. At the same time,

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though, the rival armies tried a series of flanking maneuvers designed to get around enemy defenses and strike exposed lines. These flanking actions were not very effective, but they served to push the action ever northward, all the way to the Eng- lish Channel. And as each army pushed on, it left behind a dense network of trenches, machine gun nests, and massive guns to protect the lands it controlled. By the time this so-called Race to the Sea had concluded, a 450-mile dou- ble line of trenches had been carved out of the flesh of eastern France and western Belgium, all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel. These defensive lines were subjected to brutal levels of enemy fire from machine guns, rifles, and heavy artillery, and so both armies organized transport systems to replenish their trenches with fresh troops. “The [German] transport trains con- tinue to run night and day,” wrote Englund. “Carriages full of healthy, singing men going east to the battles that are still raging there and carriages full of silent, bleeding men coming back.”13 Unable to withdraw or advance, commanders of both armies recognized that the Western Front had become a stalemate. Both armies subsequently hun- kered down in their respective trench networks—and there they remained for the next four years, during which time the Western Front became synonymous around the world with death, terror, and desolation.

Notes 1 Quoted in Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War 1918 to 1918. New York: Dela- corte Press, 2006, p. 62. 2 Quoted in Johnson, Rossiter, ed. The War in Europe: Its Causes and Consequences. New York: Sully and Kleintetch, 1914, p. 409. 3 Quoted in Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Random House, 2003, p. 71. 4 Englund, Peter. The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War. New York: Knopf, 2011, p. 13. 5 Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Translated by A. W. Wheen. 1928. New York: Bantam, 1985, p. 173. 6 Quoted in Arthur, Max. Forgotten Voices of the Great War. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2004, p. 23. 7 Quoted in Arthur, p. 22. 8 Strachan, Hew. The First World War: A New Illustrated History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003, p. 31. 9 Freedman, Russell. The War to End All Wars: World War I. Boston: Clarion Books, 2010, p. 33. 10 Quoted in “German Army’s Advance into Belgium.” The Great War and the Shaping of the Twenti- eth Century. PBS. 1996. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/greatwar/historian/hist_mommsen_01_ advance.html. 11 Quoted in Englund, p. 46. 12 Quoted in Tuchman, Barbara Wertheim. The Guns of August. New York: Dell, 1962, p. 435. 13 Englund, p. 66.