The Great War

1914-1918

Ian F. W. Beckett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317866145
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The course of events of the Great War has been told many times, spurred by an endless desire to understand 'the war to end all wars'. However, this book moves beyond military narrative to offer a much fuller analysis of of the conflict's strategic, political, economic, social and cultural impact.

Starting with the context and origins of the war, including assasination, misunderstanding and differing national war aims, it then covers the treacherous course of the conflict and its social consequences for both soldiers and civilians, for science and technology, for national politics and for pan-European revolution.

The war left a long-term legacy for victors and vanquished alike. It created new frontiers, changed the balance of power and influenced the arts, national memory and political thought.

The reach of this acount is global, showing how a conflict among European powers came to involve their colonial empires, and embraced Japan, China, the Ottoman Empire, Latin America and the United States.

Chapter 1

Another country?

The Great War of 1914–1918 is an event which is just within living memory. There are men and women alive today who experienced it as children, and a very few still living who participated in it as young adults. While wartime events clearly shaped the twentieth century, however, it is too often forgotten that those who experienced the events continued themselves to guide the political destinies of the former belligerents sometimes up to over fifty years later.

Winston Churchill, both Cabinet minister and front-line soldier between 1914 and 1918, did not retire from office as British prime minister until 1955 and both his successors, Anthony Eden (1955–57) and Harold Macmillan (1957–63), had served in the trenches of the Western Front. Macmillan may have been the ‘last Edwardian’ in Downing Street, but President Charles de Gaulle, wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans at Verdun in March 1916, continued in power in France until 1969. United States president Dwight D. Eisenhower (1952–60) had been a West Point cadet and had not seen active service, but his predecessor, Harry S. Truman (1945–52), had been an artillery officer on the Western Front in 1918. The veteran politician and former president of Turkey, serving a third term as prime minister between 1961 and 1965, Mustaf Ismet Pasha (known as Inönü), had been an exceptionally young divisional commander during the war. David Ben Gurion, prime minister of Israel from 1949 to 1953 and from 1955 to 1963, served with Britain’s Jewish Legion in Palestine, while Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), who held the post from 1954 to 1955, had served with the Ottoman army in Macedonia and Palestine. Idris, King of Libya from 1951 to 1969, had fought the Italians as a leader of the Senussi during the war. On the political left, Nikita Khrushchev, who had played a minor role in the Russian Revolution and then fought in the Russian Civil War (1917–21), was not ousted from power in the Soviet Union until 1964. Ho Chi Minh, who had tried unsuccessfully to plead the Vietnamese nationalist cause at the Paris peace conference in 1919, led North Vietnam from 1954 until his death in 1969. A veteran of the Spartacist rising in Berlin in 1918, Walter Ulbricht remained at the helm of the German Democratic Republic as first general secretary of the Communist Party from 1946 until 1971. Norman Manley, left-wing prime minister of Jamaica from 1955 to 1962, won the Military Medal serving with the Royal Artillery. Josip Broz, better known from his Second World War pseudonym of Tito (The Hammer), was first exposed to communism as an Austro-Hungarian conscript in a Russian prisoner of war camp. He was to be president of Yugoslavia, itself a creation of the Great War, from 1946 until his death in 1980.

Whatever the obvious consequences of the Second World War for Europe and the wider world, the political arena in which these men operated owed as much, if not more, to the twentieth century’s first global ‘total’ conflict. It was the Great War that destroyed four empires – those of Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia and Ottoman Turkey. The consequences were profound, not least in the Middle East, whose politics remain conditioned by events between 1914 and 1918 and the post-war settlement effected by Britain and France. Rather similarly, the Great War had a profound impact upon Ireland, with consequences that have contributed materially to contemporary divisions. The war gravely weakened Europe’s influence generally, even if the United States chose to wield its new-found power in financial rather than military or diplomatic terms. Without the Great War, communism would arguably not have triumphed in Russia, nor fascism been given its opportunity in Germany and Italy. Indeed, Churchill was not alone in choosing to regard the two world wars as a second Thirty Years’ War, echoing the conflict that had consumed much of Europe from 1618 to 1648.¹

In another sense the Great War is also still in the visual memory in that not only photographs but also early moving images on film survive. Malcolm Smith has made the important point that, prior to the expansion of cheap photography in the early years of the twentieth century, only a few adults with a wealthy background ‘had any clear idea of what they looked like as children, or what their parents looked like when they were younger, and probably only the dimmest recollection of what their grandparents had looked like at all’. Thus, the Great War just falls within what Smith has called ‘a more dependable popular memory’.² Apart from the rituals of annual remembrance and the physical evidence of war cemeteries and remains of trenches in France, Flanders and elsewhere, there are other reminders of the Great War, at least in Britain. Until recently, there were licensing laws which had endured since 1914, while British Summer Time remains a legacy of 1916. Popular linguistic usage in Britain reflects soldiers’ slang, such as Blighty, conchie, Jerry and so on. There is, too, an enduring literary and artistic legacy with which many are familiar through the medium of a handful of well-known, but hardly representative, poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Some historians would claim that this cultural legacy, which has endured in the work of contemporary writers such as Pat Barker, represents a ‘modern memory’.³

Certainly, the collective British popular memory embraces persistent myths. Indeed, it might be argued that the Great War was refashioned at the time of its fiftieth anniversary through popular histories of the time such as Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields or Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, and the musical play and film, Oh! What A Lovely War. Interestingly, when, in 1964, John Terraine, Correlli Barnett and others sought in the scripts of the landmark BBC television series The Great War, to counter what they regarded as the pervasive misinterpretation of the war, audience research reports showed that the visual content had reinforced the popular concept of the war’s futility for a mass audience estimated at 8 million per episode.⁴ As recently as 1998, tabloid headlines in the Daily Express demanded the removal of Field Marshal Earl Haig’s statue from Whitehall on the grounds that his wasting of his men’s lives rendered him no better than a war criminal. Surveying much Great War popular historiography, one is reminded of the newspaper editor’s refrain in John Ford’s classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: ‘when legend becomes fact, print the legend’.⁵

The capacity for myth-making derives largely from the fact that, despite those genuine historical echoes around us, we are now as distanced from 1914 as those who fought it were from the Great Reform Act of 1832. The past, to echo L. P. Hartley’s novel of the Edwardian era, The Go Between, is a ‘foreign country’ when it stretches beyond immediate memory. In 1967, Geoffrey Barraclough wrote that, ‘on a purely practical level of daily life, a person living today who was suddenly put back into the world of 1900 would find himself on familiar ground, whereas if he returned to 1870, even in industrialised Britain, the differences would be more striking than the similarities’.⁶ It was in this sense, therefore, that Barraclough characterised the 1890s as the beginning of ‘contemporary history’. Certainly, the Great War has become regarded as a great catalyst of change, a ‘total’ war fought on such a scale seemingly to demonstrate irrefutably Leon Trotsky’s dictum that war is the ‘locomotive of history’.

In the 1960s and 1970s, historians such as Arthur Marwick began to construct models of the inter-relationship between total war and social change, emphasising that, even where change might have been attributable to longer-term evolutionary trends, war fought on a global scale was likely to accelerate the pace of changes already taking place. In essence, therefore, Marwick’s interpretation of the Great War was as an event marking a discontinuity with the past.⁷ The issues of change and continuity are central to much historical debate, therefore it is not altogether surprising that this should be reflected in much of the continuing debate on the Great War, the thrust of recent contributions being to emphasise continuity rather than change.⁸

Industrialisation and the state

Any attempt to measure the impact of the Great War on Europe and the wider world must perforce begin with an examination of the nature of the world of 1914. Certainly, as indicated by Barraclough’s observation, there had been considerable change in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century as the technological, scientific and material explosion of social effort that had been earlier known only to Britain reached the continent. In 1870, there were perhaps as many as seventy European cities with a population of over 100,000, but Paris and London alone exceeded 1 million, the majority of Europe’s approximately 300 million people living on the land or in small towns.

Industrialisation and its attendant urbanisation allowed European societies to sustain growing populations through the increase in productive wealth, advances in preventative medicine and the beginnings of a global economy. This last resulted in more, better and cheaper foodstuffs becoming available from extra-European sources. By 1900, therefore, over two hundred European cities exceeded a population of 100,000, and Berlin, Moscow, St Petersburg, Vienna, Constantinople and Glasgow had all matched Paris and London as urban conurbations of over 1 million inhabitants.⁹

Europe’s population had grown rapidly to some 400 million in barely thirty years. It was a population with not only a longer life expectancy than ever before, but also far more educated, since industrialisation demanded a more skilled labour force. In 1850, half of Europe’s people had been illiterate, but this was to fall steadily to about 10 per cent by 1930. In part, Imperial Germany’s rapid industrial rise can be explained in terms of a sophisticated state educational system, particularly in scientific and technical subjects, but Prussia had pioneered universal primary education before 1870. By 1880, the example had been emulated by Belgium, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Educational progress naturally varied, however, from state to state. It was suggested, for example, that, whereas 1 out of every 1,000 conscripts entering the German army would be illiterate, the proportion would rise to 68 out of every 1,000 in the French army, 220 in the Austro-Hungarian army, and to 330 in the Italian army.¹⁰

Moreover, while emphasis has been placed on the consequences of urbanisation and industrialisation, this was not experienced by European society as a whole, for it was only Britain and Imperial Germany that had a higher percentage of their labour forces engaged in industry than agriculture. Indeed, whereas 34.6 per cent of the British population and 21.0 per cent of the German was urban-based in 1913, this was true of only 14.8 per cent of the French population, 11.6 per cent of the Italian, 8.8 per cent of the Austro-Hungarian and 7.0 per cent of the Russian population.¹¹

The rapid pace of change wrought by industrialisation in western Europe sharpened the contrast with most of the states of central, southern and eastern Europe. These remained in effect peasant societies, for all that the agricultural depression of the 1870s to 1890s had accelerated the movement of the rural population towards towns and, in the case of southern Europe, to the United States. In fact, some of the more rapid increases in population were measured ...