The First World War

A New History

Hew Strachan

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781471134265
• eBook ISBN: 9781471134364
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

'Quite simply the best short history of the war in print... Strachan has emerged as the master of us all who write of war in English' Dennis Showalter A brilliant and penetrating new history of the First World War by one of the world's foremost experts on the conflict. Reissued with a new introduction from the author. The popular view of the First World War is dominated by cliché young British soldiers, many of them budding poets, led to early and ghastly deaths in muddy wastes by incompetent generals for reasons that were seemingly futile. As this magisterial new one volume history of the war illustrates, however, the cliché is only part of the truth. Hew Strachan argues that the war had become a 'world war' long before the involvement of the United States, and that for those liberal countries struggling to defend their freedoms, the war was far from futile. Accessible, compelling and utterly convincing, this is modern history writing at its finest. Accessible, compelling and utterly convincing, this is modern history writing at its finest.

Austria-Hungary: An Empire under Threat

The weekend of 12–14 June 1914 was a busy one at Konopischt, the hunting lodge and favourite home of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Here he could indulge his passion for field sports, and here he and his wife, Sophie, could escape the stultifying conventions of the Habsburg court in Vienna. Although he was heir apparent to his aged uncle, Franz Josef, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, his wife was treated according to the rank with which she had been born, that of an impoverished Czech aristocrat. On their marriage, Franz Ferdinand had been compelled to renounce royal privileges both for her and for their children. At court dinners she sat at the foot of the table, below all the archduchesses, however young; at a ball in 1909, an Austrian newspaper reported, ‘the members of the Imperial House appeared in the Ballroom, each Imperial prince with a lady on his arm according to rank, whereas the wife of the Heir to the Throne was obliged to enter the room last, alone and without escort’.¹

Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were expecting two sets of guests, and got on well with both of them. The first, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, treated Sophie with a warmness that provided a refreshing contrast with Habsburg flummery. He had been under thirty when he ascended the throne in 1888, and his youth and vigour had inspired the hopes of a nation which saw itself as possessed of the same qualities. Germany was younger even than its ruler, having united under Prussia’s leadership in 1871. By 1914, however, the paradoxes of Wilhelm’s character, at once both conservative and radical, seemed to be manifestations of inconsistency rather than innovation. Born with a withered arm and blighted by an uncertain relationship with his English mother, a daughter of Queen Victoria, the Kaiser was a man of strong whims but minimal staying power. Ostensibly, he had come to admire Konopischt’s garden; in reality, he and Franz Ferdinand discussed the situation in the Balkans.

This, the most backward corner of Europe, was where the First World War would begin. The problems it generated, which preoccupied Wilhelm and Franz Ferdinand, were not Germany’s; they were Austria-Hungary’s. Vienna, not Berlin, was to initiate the crisis that led to war. It did so with full deliberation, but the war it had in mind was a war in the Balkans, not a war for the world.

By 1914 Austria-Hungary had lost faith in the international order established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, whose robustness had prevented major war on the continent for a century. For twenty years, between 1792 and 1815, Europe had been racked by wars waged at France’s behest; they had challenged the old order, and they had promoted or even provoked nationalism and liberalism. For the Habsburg Empire, whose lands stretched from Austria south into Italy, and east into Hungary and Poland, and which claimed suzerainty over the states and principalities of Germany to the north, national self-determination threatened disintegration. In 1815 it therefore sponsored a settlement whose principles were conservative – which used the restoration of frontiers to curb France and elevated the resulting international order to suppress nationalism and liberalism. Rather than run the risk of major war again, the great powers agreed to meet regularly thereafter. Although formal congresses rapidly became more intermittent, the spirit of the so-called Concert of Europe continued, even when it transpired that the forces of nationalism and liberalism could be moderated but not deflected. After the revolutions that broke out in much of Europe in 1848, war occurred more often. Conservatives realised that liberals did not have a monopoly on nationalism, although for the multi-national Austrian Empire the effect of nationalism remained divisive. In 1859 it lost its lands in Lombardy to the unification of Italy. Seven years later, it forfeited control of Germany to Prussia after the defeat at Königgrätz, and in the aftermath it struck a deal with Hungary which acknowledged the latter’s autonomy, recognising that the Emperor of Austria was also the King of Hungary. But, despite these challenges, the ideals of the Concert of Europe persisted. Wars remained short and contained. Even when Prussia invaded France in 1870 and emerged as the leader of a federal German state, the other powers did not intervene.

However, the writ of the 1815 system did not embrace Europe’s south-eastern corner. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the entire Balkan peninsula, as far west as modern Albania and Bosnia and as far north as Romania, was part of the Ottoman Empire. From its capital in Constantinople, the Turks ruled the modern Middle East, with further territory in North Africa, Arabia and the Caucasus. As a result, many of the Balkan population were Muslim and therefore outside the purview of what the Tsar of Russia, in particular, had seen as a Christian alliance. Indeed, Russia itself had invaded the Balkans, and on the third occasion, in 1878, the representatives of the great powers convened in Berlin and recognised three independent Balkan states, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania, and expanded the frontiers of two more, Bulgaria and Greece. The Concert of Europe had put its seal on the decline of Ottoman power in the Balkans, but it had left a situation in which international order in the region depended on the forbearance and cooperation of two of its number: Russia and Austria-Hungary.

For Austria-Hungary the situation in the Balkans was as much a matter of domestic politics as of foreign policy. The empire consisted of eleven different nationalities, and many of them had ethnic links to independent states that lay beyond its frontiers. Austria itself was largely German, but there were Italians in Tyrol, Slovenes in Styria, Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia, and Poles and Ruthenes in Galicia. In the Hungarian half of the so-called Dual Monarchy, the Magyars were politically dominant but numerically in a minority, hemmed in by Slovaks to the north, Romanians to the east, and Croats to the south. In 1908 the foreign minister, Alois Lexa von Aerenthal, had annexed Bosnia-Herzogovina, still formally part of the Ottoman Empire, at the top end of the Balkan peninsula. He had hoped to do so without disrupting Austro-Russian cooperation in the area, but he had ended up compounding Austria-Hungary’s problems in two ways. First, Russia had disowned the deal. Thereafter, the interests of the two powers in the region competed rather than converged, and this was an opportunity which the Balkan states were only too ready to exploit. Secondly, and relatedly, Bosnia-Herzogovina was populated not only by Bosnians but also by Croats and Serbs. Serbia took the view that, if Bosnia was not to be under Ottoman rule, it should be governed from Belgrade.

Serbia embodied the challenge that confronted Franz Ferdinand – or would do so when he eventually succeeded to the throne. Writ large, it said that nationalism outside the empire threatened the survival of the empire from within. Writ in regional terms, it said that Serbia had to be contained. In two Balkan wars, fought in rapid succession in 1912 and 1913, Serbia had doubled its territory and increased its population from 2.9 million to 4.4 million. Serbia’s victories kindled the hopes not only of Serbs but also of some Bosnians and Croats, who aspired to create a new south Slav state in the Balkans. Those aware of the more unsavoury features of Serb government appreciated that such a state might mean not liberation but rather subordination to a greater Serbia. Indubitably, however, neither a south Slav state nor a greater Serbia could be created without considerable cost to Austria-Hungary – whether in its capacity as a Balkan power or as the ruler of other ethnic groups with nationalist ambitions elsewhere. Vienna had not intervened in either Balkan war. Austria-Hungary had paid a price for abstention. Its own interests had been ignored in the subsequent settlements, and the Balkan states had been rewarded rather than penalised for discounting international agreements. Since 1815 the great powers of Europe had kept the peace by being ready to broker deals among themselves; in 1914 it seemed to Austrians that the Concert of Europe could no longer be relied upon to protect Austria-Hungary’s interests.

The discussions between Franz Ferdinand and Wilhelm at Konopischt did not just concern foreign policy. Like so many of Austria-Hungary’s difficulties, the policy with regard to the Balkans carried significant domestic implications. Vienna needed an ally in the region and the obvious candidate seemed to be Romania. It had a wartime army of up to 600,000 men, a powerful consideration when Austria-Hungary’s own peacetime military strength was only 415,000. Its king, Carol, was a member of the Hohenzollern family, the royal dynasty of Prussia. And it was, at least secretly, affiliated to the Triple Alliance of which not only Germany and Austria-Hungary were members but also Italy. However, Austria-Hungary’s possible affections for Romania had little prospect of being reciprocated. The obstacle was Transylvania, ethnically Romanian but part of Hungary. Determined to hold on to power, the Magyars rejected constitutional reform for non-Magyars. They were a thorn in Franz Ferdinand’s flesh in another way, too. The compromise between Austria and Hungary was subject to renewal every ten years. Franz Ferdinand had thought long and hard about the options for the future governance of the empire. He had entertained both federalism and trialism – a three-way split which would create a south Slav unit alongside those of Austria and Hungary. The latter might appease the Bosnians, Croats and even Serbs, but for the Magyars either solution would mean a loss of power. By 1914 his instincts were veering back towards centralisation under Austro-German domination.

The Kaiser was inclined to take a less jaundiced view of the Magyars. He had met their prime minister, István Tisza, in March, and had been sufficiently impressed to declare that the Magyars were honorary Teutons. What the Konopischt discussions boiled down to was whether Tisza could be persuaded to take a more enlightened approach to the Romanians, in the hope that Romania would then be induced to join an Austro-Hungarian Balkan league. What they were not – despite the presence in the Kaiser’s entourage of the head of the German naval office, Alfred von Tirpitz – was a war council. Franz Ferdinand did not believe Austria-Hungary could wage war in the Balkans without triggering Russian intervention, but when he pressed Wilhelm for Germany’s unconditional support the latter withheld it. The archduke was no warmonger himself: he recognised that an Austrian campaign against Serbia might push the suspect loyalties of the empire’s south Slavs beyond breaking point.

The Kaiser left Konopischt on 13 June 1914. On the following morning, a Sunday, Aerenthal’s successor as foreign minister, Leopold Berchtold, and his wife, Nandine, came for the day. Sophie and Nandine had been childhood friends. They, too, toured the garden and inspected the archduke’s art collection. Meanwhile, their husbands reviewed Franz Ferdinand’s discussion with the Kaiser. Both agreed that the time had come for a fresh initiative in the Balkans, designed to create an alliance favourable to Austria-Hungary and to isolate Serbia.

Berchtold returned to Vienna and entrusted the task of formulating this policy to Franz von Matscheko, one of a group of hawkish and thrusting officials in the Foreign Ministry. Aerenthal had tended to keep these men in check; Berchtold’s more conciliar style gave them their head. Matscheko accepted that Romania might be Vienna’s logical ally, but could see little hope of immediate progress on that front. He therefore concluded that the empire’s most likely partner was Bulgaria. Tisza and the Magyars were supportive. Bulgaria had no joint frontier with the Dual Monarchy, but it did lie along Serbia’s eastern border. It could also block Russia’s overland route to Constantinople and the Dardanelles. Matscheko stressed Russia’s aggression, its espousal of pan-Slavism, and its close relations with Serbia. The tone of Matscheko’s memorandum was shrill, but its policy was to use diplomacy, not war. Its intended readership lay principally in Germany: the Kaiser had to be persuaded to favour Bulgaria rather than Romania as an ally, and, as Austria-Hungary lacked the floating capital, the German money market would have to provide the financial inducements to woo the Bulgarian government.

The July Crisis

The other potential recipient of Matscheko’s memorandum was Franz Ferdinand himself. He never received it. Matscheko completed his labours on 24 June 1914. By then the archduke was en route for Bosnia, where he was due to attend the manoeuvres of the 15th and 16th Army Corps. He was joined there by his wife, and on Sunday, 28 June, a glorious summer day, the couple made a formal visit to Sarajevo. It was their wedding anniversary. It was also a day of commemoration for the Serbs: the anniversary of the battle of Kosovo in 1389, a terrible defeat redeemed by a single Serb, who had penetrated the Ottoman lines and killed the Sultan. Now, as then, security was lax. A private shopping visit two days earlier had passed without incident; indeed, the archduke had been well received and surrounded by dense throngs. But by the same token there was little secrecy about this occasion.

A group of students and apprentices, members of a revolutionary organisation called Young Bosnia, had crossed over from Serbia in order to assassinate the heir apparent. Although supplied with arms by Serb military intelligence, they were amateurish and incompetent. One of their number, Nedeljko Cabrinović, threw a bomb at the archduke’s car. It rolled off the back and wounded those who were following and a number of bystanders. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie went on to the town hall and then decided to visit the injured officers. Thus the planned route was changed. The driver took the wrong turning at the junction of Appel quay and Franzjosefstrasse. One of the putative assassins, a nineteen-year-old consumptive, Gavrilo Princip, was loitering on the corner, having concluded that he and his colleagues had failed. He was therefore amazed to see the archduke’s car in front of him and braking. He stepped forward and shot both the archduke and his wife at point-blank range. They died within minutes.

Matscheko’s memorandum now took on a very different complexion from that in which it had been originally framed. The automatic reaction in Vienna, as in the other capitals of the world, was that Serbia was behind the assassination. ‘The affair was so well thought out’, Berchtold informed the German ambassador, ‘that very young men were intentionally selected for the perpetration of a crime, against whom only a mild punishment could be decreed.’² Berchtold exaggerated. Serbia was in the middle of an election and its prime minister, Nikola Pašić, had enough domestic problems on his plate without compounding them. But principal among these were civil–military relations. The head of Serb military intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, code-named Apis, was one of a group of officers who had murdered the previous king in 1903. An enthusiastic promoter of the idea of a greater Serbia and a member of a secret terrorist organisation, the Black Hand, he was ‘incapable of distinguishing what was possible from what was not and perceiving the limits of responsibility and power’.³ He resisted Pašić’s attempts to subordinate the army to political control, and his sponsorship of Princip and his friends showed that he had been – in this respect, at least – successful. Pašić himself, caught between an enemy within and an enemy without, was dilatory in his response to the events in Sarajevo. The accusation of Serb complicity stuck.

In Austria-Hungary, the most powerful advocate of restraint, Franz Ferdinand, was dead. On 30 June Berchtold proposed a ‘final and fundamental reckoning with Serbia’. Franz Josef, now almost eighty-four, agreed. His eyes were moist, less because of personal grief (like others, he had found Franz Ferdinand difficult) than because he realised the potential implications of the assassination for the survival of the empire. The issue was its continuing credibility, not only as a regional player in the Balkans but also as a multi-national state and a European great power. If it lacked the authority even to be the first, it could hardly aspire to be the second.

For the first time since he had taken up office in 1906, the chief of the general staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorff, found himself in step with the Foreign Ministry. Conrad had never fought in a war but he had studied it a great deal. As a social Darwinist, he believed that the struggle for existence was ‘the basic principle behind all the events on this earth’.⁴ Therefore Austria-Hungary would at some stage have to fight a war to preserve its status. ‘Politics’, he stated, ‘consists precisely of applying war as method.’⁵ In other words, state policy should be geared to choosing to fight a war at the right time and on the best terms. The Bosnian crisis in 1908–9 had been one such opportunity. Conrad had demanded a preventive war with Serbia. He went on to do so repeatedly, according to one calculation twenty-five times in 1913 alone. Both Aerenthal and Franz Ferdinand had kept Conrad in check, using his bellicosity when they needed it to send a diplomatic signal and marginalising him when they did not.

By the summer of 1914 Conrad thought the increasing tensions in his relationship with the archduke meant that his remaining time in office was likely to be short. This worried him for personal as well as professional reasons. He was deeply in love with Gina von Reininghaus, who was married and the mother of six children. In a country as devoutly Catholic as Austria, divorce seemed to be out of the question – unless Conrad could return victorious from a great war. Certainly Conrad’s response to Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was more visceral than rational. He favoured war, although he believed that ‘It will be a hopeless fight’. ‘Nevertheless’, he wrote to Gina, ‘it must be waged, since an old monarchy and a glorious army must not perish without glory.’⁶

The shift from certainty in the value of a preventive war against Serbia in 1909 to reliance on hazard in 1914 was the reflection of two considerations. The first was the poor state of the army Conrad led. For this both he and his erstwhile mentor, Franz Ferdinand, were wont to blame the Magyars. In 1889 the annual contingent of conscripts was set at 135,670 men. This fixed quota meant that the size of the joint Austro-Hungarian army did not grow in step with the expansion of the population or with the increase in size of other armies. But not until 1912 did Hungary approve a new army law, which permitted an addition of 42,000 men. It was too little too late: the lost years could not be made up. The trained reservists available to other powers in 1914, discharged conscripts who ranged in age from their early twenties up to forty, were simply not there in Austria-Hungary’s case. Its field army was half the size of France’s or Germany’s. Nor had it compensated for its lack of men with firepower: each division had forty-two field guns compared with fifty-four in a German division, and the good designs to be found among some of the heavier pieces had not been converted to mass production. The two territorial armies, the Landwehr for Austria and the Honved for Hungary, had only twenty-four field guns per division, but the deficiencies of the regular army meant that they had to be used as part of the field army from the outset of the war. Austria-Hungary had no reserve if the war expanded or became protracted.

In military terms Austria-Hungary was already more a regional power by July 1914 than a European one. Its army was good only for a war in the Balkans, and it was not really capable of fighting more than one power at a time. Therefore Russia’s attitude was crucial to Austro-Hungarian calculations. In 1909 Russia had not been a major player, as its humiliating acceptance of the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzogovina testified. It had been defeated by Japan in 1904, and revolution had followed in 1905. But the Bosnian crisis marked the point...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• MAPS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 To Arms
• 2 Under the Eagle
• 3 Global War
• 4 Jihad
• 5 Shackled to a Corpse
• 6 Breaking the Deadlock
• 7 Blockade
• 8 Revolution
• 9 Germany’s Last Gamble
• 10 War Without End
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• NOTES
• INDEX
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS