List of Illustrations List of Maps Acknowledgements A book like this depends more than most on the suggestions and encouragement of others - sometimes without them being aware of how they were helping. In a variety of ways I am grateful to: Joe Bergin, Richard Bessel, John Breuilly, Franz Brüggemeier, Chris Clark, Paul Corner, David Dilks, Christopher Duggan, Richard Evans, Detleff Felken, Jürgen Förster, Norbert Frei, Elke Fröhlich, Mary Fulbrook, Dick Geary, Robert Gerwarth, Christian Göschel, Mike Hannah, Joe Harrison, Julia Hoffmann, Dov Kulka, Eberhard Jäckel, Margit Ketterle, Peter Liddle, Klaus A. Maier, Michael Mann, Andy Marrison, members of the Cambridge Modern History Seminar, Hans Mommsen, Bob Moore, Irene Nielsen, Frank O'Gorman, Peter Pulzer, Aron Rodrigue, Mary Vincent, George Wedell, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Frieder Weitbrecht, Charlotte Woodford, Hans Woller, Jonathan Wright and Benjamin Ziemann. I am indebted to Gerhard Hirschfeld for sending me the outstanding and authoritative encyclopaedia of the First world War which he co-edited (and which has subsequently appeared in a splendid English edition). Bernt Hagtvet was more than kind in supplying me with two extremely useful and informative volumes which I had not come across and deserve to be better known: the collection of essays edited by Dirk Berg-Schlosser and Jeremy Mitchell on the crises of democracy in inter-war Europe, and that by Stein Ugelvik Larsen on the transition from fascism to democracy after 1945. I'm also grateful to Norman Davies, who pointed me towards a number of first-hand accounts of events in Poland, including the fascinating memoirs of a village mayor, Jan Słoma, and to Andreas Kossert for further references to Polish sources. I owe special gratitude to a number of people for their critical commentaries on the text. Beverley Eaton erased many typographical errors. Traude Spät made some excellent suggestions (and she and Ulrich provided their usual generous hospitality on my stays in Munich). At an expert level I owe warm thanks for their valuable points of constructive criticism to David Cannadine (general editor of the Penguin History of Europe series), Laurence Rees and Nicholas Stargardt. And when the drafts were complete, Richard Mason proved a splendidly meticulous copy-editor. As on earlier occasions it was a pleasure to work with the excellent team at Penguin. Simon Winder was as always an exemplary editor. He and Maria Bedford were also a great help in researching and helping to select the pictures, while Richard Duguid oversaw the production with his customary efficiency. My thanks, too, to Auriol Griffith-Jones for her skilful compilation of the index. I am grateful as ever to Andrew Wylie, a literary agent sans pareil, and at the Wylie Agency in London to James Pullen and Sarah Chalfant for unfailing help and advice. Betty, David and Stephen have been throughout an unending source of support and encouragement. Betty raised a number of pertinent queries about points of detail in the text, while discussions of the drafts with David in the Royal Oak in Didsbury were highly enjoyable as well as constructive. Finally, our five grandchildren, Sophie, Joe, Ella, Olivia and Henry, have never ceased to provide wonderful and happy distraction from the dismal tale I have had to tell here. Let us hope that they and others of their generation enjoy a future Europe that can exist without the divisions, rancour and hatreds that have darkened its past. Ian Kershaw, Manchester, May 2015 Preface This is the first of two volumes on the history of Europe from 1914 to our own times. It is by some distance the hardest book I have undertaken. Each book I have written has in some sense been an attempt to gain a better understanding on my part of a problem in the past. In this case, the recent past contains a multiplicity of extremely complex problems. But whatever the difficulties, the temptation to try to understand better the forces that have in the recent past shaped the world of today was irresistible. There is, of course, no single way to approach a history of the twentieth century in Europe. Some excellent histories with varying interpretations and structures - among them, each with a different slant on the century, the works of Eric Hobsbawm, Mark Mazower, Richard Vinen, Harold James and Bernard Wasserstein - already exist. This volume and the one to follow it necessarily represent a personalized approach to such a momentous century. And like every attempt to cover a vast panorama over a lengthy time span, it has to rely heavily upon the pioneering research of others. I am more than conscious of the fact that for practically every sentence I wrote a plethora of specialist works, often of great quality, was available. Only for a few aspects, mainly relating to Germany between 1918 and 1945, can I claim to have carried out primary research. Elsewhere, I have had to depend upon the excellent work of other scholars in many different fields. Even with greater linguistic competence than I possess this would have been inevitable. No single scholar could possibly carry out archival work throughout Europe, and, since invariably experts on particular countries and on specific historical themes have already done such work, the attempt would be pointless anyway. Such an overview as I am presenting has, therefore, to rest on the countless achievements of others. The format of the Penguin History of Europe series precludes references to the many indispensable works of historical scholarship - monographs, editions of contemporary documentation, statistical analyses, and specialized studies of individual countries - on which I have relied. The bibliography reflects some of my more important debts to other scholars. I hope they will forgive the inability to refer to their works in footnotes, and will accept my deep appreciation of their great endeavours. Any originality rests, therefore, solely on structure and interpretation - how the history is written and the underlying nature of the argument. The introduction, 'Europe's Era of Self-Destruction', lays out the framework of interpretation of this volume as well as indicating the approach to the second volume (yet to be written). As regards the structure, I have organized the chapters that follow chronologically with thematic sub-divisions. This reflects my concern to pay particular attention to precisely how the drama unfolded, and to the specific shaping of events by concentrating on fairly short periods while necessarily dealing separately within those periods with the differing formative forces. So there are no chapters devoted expressly to the economy, society, culture, ideology or politics, though these find their place, if not necessarily with equal weight, within individual chapters. The first half of the twentieth century, the subject of this volume, was dominated by war. This raises its own problems. How is it possible to deal with the vast and momentous topics of the First and Second World Wars within such a wide-ranging volume as this? Whole libraries of works exist on both conflicts. But readers may justifiably be expected not simply to be referred to other works (though naturally these can be followed up on every theme of the volume). So I thought it worthwhile to begin the chapters relating directly to the two world wars with extremely concise surveys of the developments on the fronts. However tersely described - largely for orientation, and to highlight in the briefest terms the scale of the calamities that determined the immensity of their consequences - it is obvious that these events were crucial. In other instances, too, I pondered whether to take for granted that all readers would be well acquainted with, for example, the background to the rise of fascism in Italy or to the course of the Spanish Civil War, before deciding that, again, brief surveys might prove useful. Throughout, I have been anxious to blend in personal experiences of contemporaries to give an indication of what it was like to live through this era, so near in time yet so different in nature to present- day Europe. Of course, I recognize that personal experience is just that. It cannot be taken as statistically representative. But it can often be seen as indicative - reflective of wider attitudes and mentalities. In any case, the inclusion of personal experiences provides vivid snapshots and gives a flavour, detached from abstractions and impersonal analysis, of how people reacted to the mighty forces that were buffeting their lives. A history of Europe cannot, of course, be a sum of national histories. What is at stake are the driving forces that shaped the continent as a whole in all or at least most of its constituent parts. A general synthesis has naturally to offer a bird's-eye rather than a worm's-eye view. It has to generalize, not concentrate on peculiarities, though unique developments only in fact become visible through a wide lens. I have tried not to ignore any areas of Europe, and often to emphasize the specially tragic history of the eastern half of the continent. But inevitably, some countries played a greater (or more baleful) role than others and correspondingly warrant more attention. Europe in this volume and the next is taken to include Russia (then the Soviet Union); it would be unthinkable to leave out such a crucial player in European history, even if extensive parts of the Russian, then Soviet, Empire lay geographically outside Europe. Similarly, Turkey is included where it was significantly involved in European affairs, though this sharply diminished after 1923 once the Ottoman Empire had broken up and the Turkish nation state had been established. This volume begins with a brief overview of Europe on the eve of the First World War. Chapters then follow on the war itself, its immediate aftermath, the short-lived recovery in the mid-1920s, the searing impact of the Great Depression, the looming threat of another world war, the unleashing of a further great conflagration within a generation, and the devastating collapse of civilization that this Second World War produced. At this point I interrupt the chronological structure with a thematic chapter (Chapter 9), which explores a number of long-term thematic developments that cross the short-term chronological boundaries of earlier chapters - demographic and socio-economic change, the position of the Christian Churches, the stance of intellectuals and the growth of popular entertainment. A concluding chapter returns to a chronological framework. I had thought of ending this first volume in 1945, when the actual fighting in the Second World War stopped. But, though formal hostilities in Europe ceased in May of that year (continuing until August against Japan), the fateful course of the years 1945-9 was so plainly determined by the war itself, and reactions to it, that I thought it justifiable to look beyond the moment when peace officially returned to the continent. The contours of a new, post-war Europe were scarcely visible in 1945; they only gradually came clearly into view. It seemed to me, therefore, appropriate to add a final chapter dealing with the immediate aftermath of the war, which not only saw a period of continuing violence but also indelibly shaped the divided Europe that had emerged by 1949. So the first volume ends not in 1945, but in 1949. One of the most beloved clichés of football commentators, when the half-time interval has brought a remarkable change of fortunes, is: 'It's a game of two halves.' It is very tempting to think of Europe's twentieth century as a century of two halves, perhaps with 'extra time' added on after 1990. This volume deals only with the first half of an extraordinary and dramatic century. This was the era in which Europe carried out two world wars, threatened the very foundations of civilization, and seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. Ian Kershaw, Manchester, November 2014 Introduction: Europe's Era of Self-Destruction The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings. Winston Churchill (1901) Europe's twentieth century was a century of war. Two world wars followed by over forty years of 'cold war' - itself the direct product of the Second World War - defined the age. It was an extraordinarily dramatic, tragic and endlessly fascinating period, its history one of huge upheaval and astounding transformation. During the twentieth century, Europe went to hell and back. The continent, which for nearly one hundred years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had prided itself on being the apogee of civilization, fell between 1914 and 1945 into the pit of barbarism. But a calamitous self-destructive era was followed by previously unimaginable stability and prosperity - though at the heavy price of unbridgeable political division. Thereafter, a reunified Europe, facing huge internal pressures from intensified globalization and serious external challenges, experienced increasing inbuilt tensions even before the financial crash of 2008 plunged the continent into a new, still unresolved, crisis. A second volume will explore the era after 1950. This first volume, however, looks at Europe's near self-destruction in the first half of the century, during the era of the two world wars. It explores how the dangerous forces emanating from the First World War culminated in scarcely imaginable depths of inhumanity and destruction during the Second. This catastrophe, together with the unprecedented levels of genocide from which the conflict cannot be separated, makes the Second World War the epicentre and determining episode of Europe's troubled history in the twentieth century. The chapters that follow explore the reasons for this immeasurable catastrophe. They locate these in four interlocking major elements of comprehensive crisis, unique to these decades: (1) an explosion of ethnic-racist nationalism; (2) bitter and irreconcilable demands for territorial revisionism; (3) acute class conflict - now given concrete focus through the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and (4) a protracted crisis of capitalism (which many observers thought was terminal). Bolshevism's triumph was a vital new component after 1917. So was the almost constant state of crisis of capitalism, alleviated for only a brief few years in the mid-1920s. The other elements had been present before 1914, though in far less acute form. None had been a primary cause of the First World War. But the new virulence of each was a crucial outcome of that war. Their lethal interaction now spawned an era of extraordinary violence, leading to a Second World War far more destructive even than the First. Worst affected from the interlinkage of the four elements were central, eastern and south-eastern Europe - for the most part the poorest regions of the continent. Western Europe fared better (though Spain was an important exception). The disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires at the end of the First World War, and the immense violent upheavals of the Russian Civil War that followed directly on the Revolution, unleashed new forces of extreme nationalism in which identity with the nation was usually defined ethnically. Nationalist and ethnic conflict was especially endemic in the poorer eastern half of the continent - the regions of long-standing ethnically mixed communities. Often nationalist hatred singled out Jews as special scapegoats for resentment and social misery. There were more Jews in central and eastern than western Europe, and they were mainly less well integrated and of a lower social class than their co-religionists in west European countries. These central and east European regions, far more so than Germany, were the traditional heartlands of vicious antisemitism. The greater ethnic homogeneity that generally existed in western Europe, and the fact that its nation states had usually evolved over a lengthy period of time, meant that the tensions there, though not completely absent, were less great than to the east. The victors and most of the neutral countries in the First World War were, moreover, to be found in western Europe. Damaged national prestige and competition for material resources, the feeding-ground for aggressive ethnic nationalism, played a much greater role farther east. In the centre of the continent, Germany, the most important defeated country and the key to Europe's future peace, with borders stretching from France and Switzerland in the west to Poland and Lithuania in the east, harboured great resentment at its treatment by the victorious Allies and only temporarily quelled its revisionist ambitions. Further south and east, the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires gave birth to new nation states, often patched together in the least propitious circumstances imaginable. It is no surprise that the nationalist and ethnic hatreds that poisoned politics should make these regions the major killing-grounds of the Second World War. Nationalist conflicts and ethnic-racial tensions were greatly intensified by the territorial settlement of Europe that followed the First World War. The architects of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, however good their intentions, faced insuperable problems in attempting to satisfy the territorial demands of the new countries formed out of the wreckage of the old empires. Ethnic minorities formed sizeable parts of most of the new states in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe, offering a potential base for serious political disturbance. Almost everywhere, borders were disputed and the demands of ethnic minorities, which usually faced discrimination from the majority population, were unresolved. These Versailles border reallocations moreover fostered dangerously simmering resentments in countries that felt themselves unfairly treated. Although Italy had no internal ethnic divisions (apart from the largely German-speaking population of South Tyrol, annexed after the end of the war), nationalists and fascists could exploit the sense of injustice that a country on the side of the victorious powers in the First World War should be deprived of the gains it aspired to in territory that would soon be called Yugoslavia. Far more dangerous for Europe's lasting peace, the deep anger in Germany - like Italy, lacking internal ethnic divisions - at the truncation of territory after the war, and the demands for revision of the Versailles Treaty, later fed into the growing support for Nazism, and outside the Reich's borders encouraged the resentment of German ethnic minorities in Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. The shrill nationalism that emerged after the First World War gained momentum not just from ethnic rivalry but also from class conflict. A sense of national unity could be immeasurably sharpened by a focus on supposed class 'enemies' within and outside the nation state. The immense economic upheaval that followed the war and the dire consequences of the slump of the 1930s greatly intensified class antagonism throughout Europe. Class conflict, frequently violent, had of course punctuated the entire industrial era. But it was made far more acute, compared with the pre-war years, by the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union. This provided an alternative model of society, one that had overthrown capitalism and created a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Elimination of the capitalist class, expropriation by the state of the means of production, and land redistribution on a massive scale were attractive propositions after 1917 for wide sections of the impoverished masses. But the presence of Soviet communism also split the political Left, fatally weakening it, at the same time as it hugely strengthened extreme nationalist right-wing forces. Revitalized elements from the Right could direct the violent energies of those who felt threatened by Bolshevism - in the main the traditional propertied elites, the middle classes and the landholding peasantry - into new, highly aggressive political movements. Counter-revolution, like the revolutionary appeal on the Left, exploited the bitterness and anxieties of class conflict. Counter-revolutionary movements gained their most widespread appeal where they were able to combine extreme nationalism with virulent anti-Bolshevism. Again, countries in central and eastern Europe, where the Bolshevik threat was seen to loom large, were particularly affected. But the greatest international danger arose where the combination of extreme nationalism and almost paranoid hatred of Bolshevism gave succour to the creation of mass movements on the Right, which in Italy and then later in Germany were able to take over power in the state. When in these cases the hate-filled nationalist and anti-Bolshevik energies that had propelled the extreme Right to power could be channelled into external aggression, the peace of Europe stood in great jeopardy. The fourth component, underpinning and interacting with the other three elements, was the lasting crisis of capitalism between the wars. The massive disturbance to the world economy caused by the First World War, the serious weakness of the major European economies of Britain, France and Germany, and the reluctance of the one outstanding economic power, the USA, to engage fully with European reconstruction, spelled disaster. Europe's problems were compounded by the worldwide repercussions of the war. Japan expanded its markets in the Far East, not least in China - wracked by political chaos - at the expense of the Europeans. The British Empire faced mounting political as well as economic challenges, most obviously in India where the growth of an indigenous textile industry and consequent loss of export markets added to Britain's economic woes. And Russia effectively disappeared from the world economy in the wake of revolution and civil war. Capitalism's crisis was global, but especially damaging in Europe. The inflationary crisis of the early 1920s and deflationary crisis of the 1930s bracketed an all too short-lived boom that proved to have been built on sand. The two phases, only briefly separated, of massive economic and social dislocation provided a climate in which both deprivation and fear of deprivation massively fuelled the political extremes. Economic turmoil on its own was insufficient to produce major political upheaval. For that, the turmoil needed a crisis in the legitimacy of the state underpinned by an existing ideological schism and deep cultural divides that exposed weakened power-elites to new pressures from mass mobilization. Precisely such conditions were, however, present in many parts of Europe, especially where extreme integral nationalism, drawing on a wide-ranging sense of loss of national prestige and disappointed expectations of great-power status, could foster a strong movement that drew energy from the alleged strength of the diabolical enemies it claimed to face, and was in a position to challenge for power in a state with weak authority. What was needed, therefore, to engender the comprehensive political, socio-economic and ideological-cultural crisis that brought Europe to the verge of self-destruction was the intermeshing of the four components of the crisis. In one degree or another, such interaction affected most European countries, even in western Europe. But in one country, especially - Germany - all four elements were present in their most extreme form, reinforcing each other with explosive effect. And when Adolf Hitler, exploiting the comprehensive crisis in masterly fashion and with ideas of overcoming it by use of force, was able to cement his dictatorial control over the German state, the odds on general catastrophe in Europe shortened markedly. Since Germany's military as well as economic potential was so great (if temporarily diminished after the First World War) and since its revisionist claims and expansionist ambitions directly impinged upon the territorial integrity and political independence of so many other countries, the probability that Europe's crisis would end in a cataclysmic new war became increasingly high. It was no surprise that the crisis would come to a head in central and eastern Europe, the most destabilized parts of the continent, nor that, once war had begun, the lands in the east would turn into the theatre of the greatest destruction and grotesque inhumanity. The devastation of the Second World War plumbed new depths. The moral consequences of such a profound collapse of civilization would be felt for the rest of the century, and beyond. Yet, remarkably, the Second World War, in stark contrast to the mayhem engendered by the First, paved the way for Europe's rebirth in the latter half of the century. Where the First World War had left behind a legacy of heightened ethnic, border and class conflict together with a deep and prolonged crisis of capitalism, the Second swept away this concatenation in its very maelstrom of destruction. The Soviet Union's domination of eastern Europe forcibly suppressed internal ethnic divisions and unrest. The immediate post-war grand-scale ethnic cleansing reshaped the map of central and eastern Europe. Germany's dreams of domination in Europe were extinguished in the country's total defeat, devastation and division. There was a new readiness in western Europe to defuse nationalist antagonism in favour of cooperation and integration. Borders were now fixed by the presence of the new superpowers. The conversion into west European state ideologies of the earlier anti-Bolshevism that had bolstered the extreme Right fostered stable conservative politics. And not least the reformed capitalism (this time with an active lead provided by the USA) produced untold prosperity in the western half of the continent, thereby underpinning political stability. All these fundamental changes after 1945 combined to remove the matrix of crisis elements that had nearly destroyed the continent in the era of the two world wars. Crucially, the Second World War broke once and for all the system of competing European great powers struggling for mastery of the continent, which stretched back beyond Bismarck's era to the end of the Napoleonic era in 1815. In a reborn Europe, though a Europe now ideologically and politically riven, the only great powers left were the United States and the Soviet Union, glowering at each other across the Iron Curtain and presiding over the rebuilding of states and societies in their own image. There was a further vital element: once both superpowers possessed atomic bombs, as they did by 1949, and within four years even more horrifically destructive hydrogen bombs, the spectre of nuclear war threatened a level of destruction that would have left the devastation of both world wars in its shadow. That concentrated minds and played its own part in creating what, in 1945, seemed a highly unlikely era of peace in Europe. • • • How these elements interwove to transform Europe, east and west, remains to be explored in the next volume. What follows in this volume is an attempt to understand how Europe sank into the abyss during the first half of such a violent, turbulent century, but then, remarkably, already within four years of reaching rock-bottom in 1945, how it began to lay the platform for astonishing recovery - for a new Europe to emerge from the ashes of the old and to embark on the road back from hell on earth. 1 On the Brink We take pacifism very seriously! But we must get our artillery budget through. General Stumm, in Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (1930-42) Even at the time, there were premonitions that descent into war would bring an era to an end. Best known is the sense of foreboding expressed by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, on 3 August 1914: 'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.' The German Reich Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, had a similar intimation of disaster: 'I see a doom greater than human power hanging over Europe and our own people,' he exclaimed, as the prospect of war loomed ever closer towards the end of July 1914. Three years earlier, in a speech in the German parliament, the Reichstag, the German socialist August Bebel had claimed, to heated contradiction and objection, that the danger of a coming European war was mounting, and that such a war would bring catastrophe to the continent. 'The Götterdämmerung of the bourgeois world is approaching,' he declared. The war did not, as Bebel intimated, lead to the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of socialism. But he was prescient in foreseeing that it would usher in a new era. The American diplomat, George Kennan, later described the war as 'the great seminal catastrophe'. He was right. It was certainly a catastrophe. And it inaugurated an epoch - the 'Thirty Years War' of the twentieth century - in which the continent of Europe came close to destroying itself. A GOLDEN AGE? The image of a glittering era of stability, prosperity and peace, tragically swept away in the horrors to come, was what lingered, especially in the memories of the privileged classes, after the First World War. 'The Gilded Age' was how Americans came to describe the pre-war years. But the term captured the way that Europeans, too, began to think of this era. The Parisian bourgeoisie remembered 'la belle époque' as the time when French culture was the envy of the world, when Paris seemed the centre of civilization. The propertied classes of Berlin looked back at 'the Wilhelmine era' as a period of wealth, security, grandeur and the national stature that befitted the recently united Germany. Vienna, too, seemed at a pinnacle of its cultural glory, intellectual brilliance and historic imperialist grandeur. Munich, Prague, Budapest, St Petersburg, Moscow and other cities across the continent shared in an efflorescence of culture. New, challenging, provocative forms of artistic expression embraced practically all forms of art, literature, music and theatre in an explosion of bold creativity. In London, economics mattered more than culture. In the capital of a global empire, the generation after the First World War would hanker after a bygone 'golden age' of continued economic growth, flourishing trade and stable currencies. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes famously wrote after the war of 'the inhabitant of London' who could order 'by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep'. This was of course a highly privileged perspective, by an upper-middle-class man of wealth and standing in the city that was the centre of world trade. Few in the shtetls of eastern Europe, the impoverished countryside of southern Italy, Spain, Greece or Serbia, or among the urban masses huddled in the slums of Berlin, Vienna, Paris, St Petersburg or London itself, would have recognized such an idyllic existence. Still, the image of a 'golden age' was not merely a post-war construction. Despite Europe's internal divisions and nationalistic rivalries, all countries shared in the unimpeded movement of goods and capital as part of an interwoven, global international capitalist economy. The stability that permitted economic growth itself rested on recognition of the gold standard as a sort of world currency, rooted in the dominance of the City of London. In this the Bank of England held the key to the stability of the world economy. Invisible earnings from shipping, insurance, interest and exports more than matched Britain's import surpluses. There had been a big increase in the supply of gold in 1897-8, especially from South Africa. But the Bank of England neither built up excessive gold reserves, which would have damaged other countries, nor diminished them. The economies of the USA and Germany were more dynamic, growing faster than the British economy. American dominance of the world economy at some point in the future seemed probable. But Britain still had the biggest share of global trade (though this was shrinking) and was easily the largest exporter of investment capital. Rivalry for the economic exploitation of the globe among the great powers was certainly placing increasing stress on the stability of the international capitalist economy. Down to 1914, however, the system that had been of such benefit to Europe, particularly its industrialized parts, over previous decades, was still intact. Confidence in continued stability, prosperity and growth was widespread. When the great World Fair opened in Paris in 1900, it was intended to exhibit a flourishing civilization, with Europe at its heart, and to sing a loud paean of praise to progress. An age of new technology was on show. Huge machines impressed people by their power and speed. The brilliance of the 'Palace of Electricity', lit by 5,000 light bulbs, quite literally dazzled its visitors. Twenty-four European nations, along with African, Asian, and Latin American countries and the United States, displayed their elaborate pavilions - visited over the next six months, often in awestruck admiration, by no fewer than 50 million people. Eastern Europe, most notably Russia with its nine pavilions, enjoyed a strong presence. And the European 'civilizing mission' featured prominently. With imperialism at its height, the lavishly exotic depictions of faraway colonial possessions conveyed an overwhelming impression of European world dominance. Commerce, prosperity and peace seemed to offer the unlimited continuation of this dominance. The future looked bright. The optimism appeared justified. Compared with what had gone before, let alone with what was to come, the nineteenth century had been peaceful. There had been no general, continental war in Europe since Napoleon's era had ended in 1815. War in distant Crimea between 1853 and 1856, like the brief wars that had culminated in German and Italian unification in 1871, had not threatened the general peace of the continent. A decade after the great Paris exhibition a British writer, Norman Angell, published an international best-seller, The Great Illusion, in which he even went so far as to claim that the modern wealth flowing from commerce and a globally interwoven economy made war pointless. Many, not just in Britain, agreed. It was difficult to imagine that prosperity, peace and stability would not continue into the indefinite future, that they could be swept away so soon and so rapidly. There was, however, another far less attractive face to Europe. The social fabric was changing fast, though very unevenly, across the continent. Regions of intense and rapid industrialization coexisted with great swathes that were still primarily, often almost primevally, agricultural. Around four-fifths of the working population of Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania still earned their living from the land in 1913. Across Europe as a whole, the proportion was over two-fifths. Only in Britain did it fall to little over a tenth. And in 1913 only in Britain, Belgium and, more surprisingly, Switzerland - not yet even in Germany - were over two-fifths of the working population employed in industry. Most Europeans still lived in villages or small towns. Standards of living continued to improve, though they were still miserable for the majority of Europeans, whether they had joined the teeming masses seeking work in the insanitary conditions of rapidly swelling cities such as Berlin, Vienna or St Petersburg, or whether they still eked out a precarious existence in the countryside. Many voted with their feet and left. Poverty and lack of opportunity drove many from their homelands. Far from seeing the benefits of prosperity and civilization, millions of Europeans simply could not wait to get away. Emigration to the United States of America peaked in 1907, when over a million Europeans crossed the Atlantic. The big upsurge after the start of the century - increasing threefold from the previous decade - was in those escaping from Austria-Hungary, Russia and, more than anywhere, from the impoverished south of Italy. The rapidity of social change created new political pressures that had started to threaten the established political order. Political power in Europe remained in the hands of the few in the years just before the First World War. Landed elites, old aristocratic families sometimes intermarried with new dynasties that drew their vast wealth from industry and finance capital, still formed a governing class and military leadership in most countries. Europe was, not least, still a continent of hereditary monarchies. Only Switzerland (whose age-old confederation had adopted a modern federal republican constitution in 1848), France (since 1870) and Portugal (since 1910) were republics. In Austria-Hungary, Kaiser Franz Joseph, who had been on the throne since 1848 at the head of a sprawling multi-national Habsburg Empire of over 50 million subjects, seemed to symbolize the durability of monarchical rule. A constitutional framework of government, pluralist political parties (though elected by an extremely restrictive franchise), and a legal system nevertheless existed practically everywhere. Even the Russian autocracy had been compelled to make concessions following an attempted revolution in 1905, when Tsar Nicholas II was forced to grant powers (that turned out in practice to be extremely weak) to the parliament, the Duma. But large sections of the population, even in Britain (viewed as the home of parliamentary democracy), still had no political representation. Some countries did have long-established systems of universal male suffrage. In Germany, for instance, the Reich constitution of 1871 granted all males over twenty-five the vote in Reichstag elections (though a highly restrictive franchise, guaranteeing continued landowner dominance, was retained for elections to the parliament of Prussia, an area of Germany comprising two-thirds of the entire Reich territory). In Italy the change to (almost) universal male suffrage came much later, in 1912. But women were not allowed to vote in parliamentary elections in any European country at the turn of the twentieth century. Feminist campaigns challenged this discrimination in numerous countries, though they had little success before the First World War other than in Finland (where, despite being part of the Russian Empire, it proved possible to introduce a level of democratic change following the abortive 1905 revolution in Russia) and Norway. The key change, and one that elites in every country viewed as a fundamental threat to their power, had been the rise of working-class political parties and trade unions. The 'Second International' of European socialist parties had been instituted in 1889 as an umbrella organization to coordinate the programmatic demands of national parties. Most of these parties remained wedded in one form or another to the revolutionary doctrine enunciated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their attack on the innately exploitative nature of capitalism, and their propagation of a new society based upon equality and the fair distribution of wealth, had obvious and growing appeal for large numbers of the poor and deprived industrial working class. Attempts by ruling elites to proscribe or suppress worker parties and the growing trade unions had failed. Workers were now organizing the defence of their interests better than ever before. The rapid expansion of trade unions reflected this. By 1914 trade unions in Britain had over 4 million members, in Germany more than 2.5 million, and in France about a million. In most European countries, socialist parties and movements of different kinds had found a voice and gained increasing support by the beginning of the century. French socialists gave up their divisions and united in 1905, declaring that they were 'not a party of reform, but a party of class struggle and revolution'. By the eve of the First World War the Section Française de l'Internationale Ouvrière had won 17 per cent of the popular vote and 103 seats in the Chamber of Deputies of the French parliament. In Germany, Bismarck's attempts to suppress social democracy had backfired spectacularly. Since 1890, under a Marxist programme, the Social Democratic Party of Germany had grown into the biggest socialist movement in Europe, gaining over a million members before the war. In the 1912 election for the Reichstag (the German parliament), the Social Democrats were better supported than any other party, gaining almost a third of the seats, and sending a shiver down the spine of Germany's ruling classes. In the more economically advanced parts of Europe, organized socialism, whatever the rhetoric, constrained outright militancy and channelled it into parliamentary, not revolutionary, action. Jean Jaurès in France gained a major following by advocating, despite the rhetoric of his Socialist Party, not revolution, but a parliamentary route to socialism. The German Social Democratic Party, though rhetorically bound to its Marxist doctrine, sought in practice to win power through the ballot box. In Britain the Labour Party (which adopted the name in 1906) had grown out of the trade unions and reflected their pragmatic concerns for worker interests rather than any revolutionary utopianism. The Marxist message was largely ignored in favour of the non-revolutionary message that capitalism did not need to be overthrown since it could be reformed, to the eventual benefit of the working class. State power, it was presumed, could be transformed by peaceful means to represent working-class interests. Workers in much of western, northern and central Europe were poor, but less outrightly impoverished and less militaristic than they had been in previous times. They had more to lose than their chains. They largely fell in line behind their reformist leaders. In less well-developed parts of the continent, the situation was different. The confrontation with the power of the state was more stark. There was little or no diffusion of power through intermediary organizations or social structures that gave citizens a stake in their state. Power was largely despotic and top-down, based heavily upon coercion, with an entrenched ruling caste, corrupt officialdom, and weak or non-existent representative institutions. Notions of the seemingly unlimited progress of civilization built on benign state authority and respect for the law, which later formed part of the sense of a lost 'golden age' among the middle classes in central, northern and western Europe, looked bizarre from the southern and eastern periphery of the continent. Strikes, riots and localized insurrections against state power and 'bourgeois rule' increased in Catalonia and the Basque Country, for example, in the first years of the twentieth century. Anarchism, often involving sporadic anti-state violence, had much support among the landless labourers of Andalusia. In southern Italy, where corrupt state officials were in the pockets of the estate-holders, violent rural unrest was endemic. Bands of brigands roaming the countryside blended crime with popular protest in defending peasants and landless labourers against the power of the state and big landowners. Alarm among Europe's leaders at the threat they saw from a revolutionary working class was especially acute during a big wave of industrial strikes and upheavals in 1905. In Russia, faced with a revolution that came close to toppling the Tsar, the heavy hand of state repression turned into outright counter-revolutionary violence that year, when soldiers in St Petersburg massacred two hundred workers and injured hundreds more. The revolution was suppressed. Concessions, more cosmetic than transformational, were made to parliamentary representation, but power was retained by the Tsar and his appointed ministers. To the powerless, especially to those leading the socialist movement, whatever its doctrinal divisions, it seemed obvious. Tsarist autocracy could not be reformed. It had to be overthrown. The result was the intensified, raw radicalism of Russian socialism. Not only in response to the perceived threat from left-wing movements, but also to help governments with little or no mass backing to widen the base of their support, populist counter-movements emerged. These were often sponsored directly or indirectly by industrialists or landholders keen to deflect potential class-based opposition into more controllable channels. They sought to 'nationalize' the masses, to instil in them assertive nationalist, imperialist and racist sentiments intended to benefit the political status quo. To some extent they were successful. Belligerent nationalism, vicious antisemitism and other brands of racism were commonplace outside the minority drawn to the doctrines of international socialism. The spread of basic education, the growth of literacy, and cheap popular newspapers offered the possibility of extending such influence. Mass politics was opening up to new forms of mobilization on the Right, as well as on the Left. Old certainties were starting to dissolve. The political establishment of the old conservative and liberal elites sensed new insecurity. That mobilization of the masses could pose a serious threat to the existing political and social order had prompted the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon to publish in 1895 his analysis of mass behaviour, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (in its original version, La psychologie des foules). His claim that rationality disappeared when the individual was subjected to the irrational, emotional urges of the crowd was influential as the new century began - there were forty-five reprints and seventeen translations of the book, and it later became required reading for would-be fascist dictators. Across Europe, the emotional urges that Le Bon saw as characteristic of the masses could most easily be whipped up through appeals to nationalism. Europe's ruling elites did not see nationalism as anything like as dangerous as socialism. Before the war, the dangers built into nationalist fervour were indeed containable. They laid the roots, nonetheless, of forces that would come to undermine, then ultimately destroy, the established order. Political polarization as well as tension in foreign affairs or embroilment in external conflict shaped relative levels of high-pitched nationalist rhetoric. Attempts in Spain to build unity around notions of 'national regeneration' were derailed following the disastrous defeat and loss of colonies to the USA in what had initially been a popular war in 1898. These attempts were in any event doomed to failure given the deep internal divisions, regional as well as ideological, in the country. But the crusading zeal to forge a nation reborn through struggle against internal enemies would eventually lead to catastrophic conflict. In most countries the imagery of enemies, internal as well as external, was built into rhetoric that was reaching new levels of aggression. The mass media stirred animosities - usually intensely xenophobic and often outrightly racist - that governments were glad to encourage. The South African War of 1899-1902 gave a new boost to extreme nationalistic belligerence, dubbed 'jingoism', in Great Britain. In Germany the conservative government whipped up nationalist fervour in the so-called 'Hottentot election' of 1907 to besmirch the Social Democrat opponents with alleged lack of patriotism. (That the Social Democrats actually increased the size of their vote - though losing substantial numbers of seats - indicates that, as in Britain, jingoism had far greater currency among the middle classes than among workers.) Nationalist organizations such as the Pan-German League, the Navy League and the German Defence League - each of them largely finding their appeal among the middle and lower-middle classes - urged a more radically assertive and expansionist foreign policy. Before 1914, they remained no more than significant pressure groups, still outsiders to mainstream politics, let alone government. By now, even so, assertive nationalist ideas had permeated practically the whole of politics, beyond the socialist Left. In Italy the lingering sense of national humiliation at the calamitous defeat of colonial Italian forces (with the loss of over 5,000 Italian troops) by an Ethiopian army at Adowa in 1896, and the feeling that the country was a 'proletarian nation' with no seat at the top table of Europe's imperialist great powers, boosted a nationalist feeling of almost religious fervour, emphasizing struggle and sacrifice, and advocating a strong anti-socialist state, military power and a more assertive foreign policy. For all the noise they made, Italian nationalists were far from representing majority opinion in a deeply divided society, and were still largely an irritant to government. Even so, nationalist pressure played its part in the decision of the Liberal government to gain a colony by invading Libya in 1911 - the first war in which aerial bombardment played a part, when the Italians bombed retreating Ottoman troops from a dirigible. In Italy, as in Germany, radical nationalism was still a minority taste. Maybe without the Great War it would have remained as such. But the seeds of later pernicious development had been sown. Nationalism was increasingly defining 'the nation' not by territory, but by ethnicity - by those who should be permitted to belong to it. A French nationalist, Edmond Archdéacon, for instance, proclaimed himself in the 1902 election to be 'a declared opponent of internationalism. As an antisemite I demand that the 150,000 Jews and their lackeys, the 25,000 Freemasons, stop oppressing and ruining 38 million Frenchmen.' He represented, he said, 'the true Republic, the French republic'. In fact, in France as in other parts of Europe, nationalism as a political movement was riven with internal divisions, incapable of reaching out for state power, but nevertheless able to make governments more shrill in their foreign-policy assertions. And although nationalist politics were confined to the margins in France, the ideas at their heart - a nation defined by exclusion of those deemed not fit to belong to it, Jews quite specifically - remained undiluted as one part of a divided French culture. Similar arguments played out in much of Europe. Antisemitism was a new term for an old phenomenon, widespread across the continent: hatred of Jews. Traditional Christian antagonism towards 'the killers of Christ', which had existed for centuries, remained prevalent, and was promoted by Christian clergy - Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox. Another deep-rooted element of the hatred came from age-old economic and social resentments, which had been strengthened as Jews benefited from recent freedoms to widen their involvement in business and cultural life. It swiftly found expression in the scapegoating of Jews during any economic downturn. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the long-standing, frequently vicious, forms of Jew-hatred had come to be overlain with something still worse. They were now intermixed with new, potentially lethal, race doctrines, which offered pseudo-scientific, biological justification for hatred and persecution. Older discrimination, certainly bad enough, had permitted (sometimes forced) Jews to convert to Christianity. Biological antisemitism ruled this out. Jews, in this thinking, were scientifically, racially, 'in their blood', different. A Jew could no more become a Frenchman or German, for example, than a cat could be turned into a dog. It was a doctrine that pointed not just to discrimination but to total exclusion. Beyond that, it was potentially the way to physical destruction. Antisemitic rhetoric was appalling. German antisemites used the language of bacteriology to describe Jews. Vienna's popular and admired mayor, Karl Lueger, had called Jews 'beasts of prey in human form', and had earlier said the 'Jewish problem' would be solved if all the Jews could be put on a large ship to be sunk on the high seas. Whatever the rhetoric, antisemitism as politics seemed, at least in western Europe, to be declining during the 'golden age' before the First World War. This was partly deceptive, since antisemitism often became incorporated in mainstream conservatism. The spread of negative imagery did not die away. But before the war, its impact was politically limited. Despite antisemitism on the political fringes, most Jews could feel at home in Wilhelmine Germany. The atmosphere in France, which had so recently experienced the shameful Dreyfus Affair (when the wrongful conviction for treason of a Jewish army officer unleashed a frenzy of antisemitism), seemed to Jews more threatening. But there, too, the situation improved in the early years of the new century. Far worse was the situation of Jews in eastern Europe. Brutal pogroms, leaving thousands of Jews dead and injured, often instigated by the Tsarist police and administration, had sullied parts of western Russia between 1903 and 1906. Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania and the Baltic regions were other areas where the visceral hatred of Jews was endemic. It was not just by chance that such areas would, later and in changed circumstances, become Europe's main killing-grounds. The dark face of Europe's 'golden age' of civilization and progress showed itself in embryonic form in another mode of thought: 'eugenics', and its close relation 'social darwinism'. Its origins lay in the work in London of Sir Francis Galton, who applied the evolutionary theories of his uncle Charles Darwin to argue that ability was hereditary and that the human race could be improved by genetic engineering. Already before the First World War eugenics had been attracting attention in other European countries, including Scandinavia, Switzerland and Germany, as well as the USA. It was seen as a 'progressive' science. Supporters in Britain, for example, included leading thinkers associated with the liberal establishment or the nascent political Left, such as John Maynard Keynes, Lord Beveridge, H. G. Wells, Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw. In a private letter written in 1908, over thirty years before the Nazi 'euthanasia action', the widely acclaimed English novelist D. H. Lawrence even approvingly contemplated the building of a big 'lethal chamber' into which, with a band playing softly, 'all the sick, the halt, the maimed', would be gently led. Eugenics appeared to offer the potential to 'breed out' of society the characteristics that produced criminality, alcoholism, prostitution and other forms of 'deviant' behaviour. It blended into the classic imperialist ideology of 'social darwinism', which rested upon assumptions that certain racial types were inherently superior to others. Galton himself wrote in 1908 that the first object of eugenics was to limit the birth rate of 'the unfit'. Elimination of the 'unhealthy' would over time, it was presumed, produce a fitter, healthier, 'better' society. Fears of racial degeneration through social welfare measures that encouraged procreation among the 'inferior' parts of society fed into notions of national efficiency. A German magazine ran a competition in 1911 on the question: 'What do the inferior elements cost the state and society?' It was won by a Hamburg official of the General Asylum for the Poor (who incorporated almost all welfare costs in his answer). Sterilization of 'inferiors' was an idea that started to gain ground in medical circles. In Germany, Alfred Ploetz, a doctor, linked eugenics to 'racial hygiene', establishing a 'Society for Racial Hygiene' that had a small membership of 350 and four branches in German cities by 1914. That year the Society stipulated its demand for regulation of procedures 'where abortion or sterilization appear medically desirable'. Only weeks before the war, the Reich government prepared a draft bill that rejected social or eugenic grounds for sterilization or abortion, permitting action only if there was an 'immediate threat to life or limb'. Before the bill could become law, Germany was at war. Like antisemitism, eugenics - let alone its racial hygienist variant - might without the war never have attained the significance it was to acquire in a drastically changed climate. Even so, the intellectual foundations for later developments were laid in Europe's 'golden age' of civilization. Europe before the First World War, despite its superficial peacefulness, bore the seeds of the later explosion of violence. Enmities and hatreds - nationalist, religious, ethnic, class - defaced practically every society. The Balkans and the Russian Empire were particularly violent parts of the continent. After the failed revolution in Russia in 1905, proto-fascist gangs, often supported by the police, took savage revenge on their enemies. Amid the wild outrages, Jews suffered worst. Over 3,000 murders of Jews in 690 pogroms were reported in October 1905. In Odessa the most appalling pogrom of all left 800 Jews murdered, 5,000 injured and more than 100,000 homeless. Counter-revolutionary reprisals resulted in the execution of 15,000 opponents of the Tsarist regime. Worse still was the situation in the Ottoman Empire, stretching over much of the Near and Middle East, ruled by the Turks since the fifteenth century, though now in terminal decline. Some estimates suggest that well over 80,000 Armenians were killed in the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896 during the brutal repression under Sultan Abdul-Hamid II. The slaughter was prompted by Turkish fears of rising Armenian nationalism, fuelled also by economic discontent, religious and class antagonism, and was even tolerated by the police. Massacres of Armenians continued sporadically in the Ottoman Empire. In 1909 a further 15,000-20,000 were murdered. Much of Europe's violence was, however, exported. Even where there was relative peace and growing prosperity at home, imperialist powers used considerable violence to enforce their continued domination of foreign territories and subjugated peoples in their colonies. Four-fifths of the globe was controlled, directly or indirectly, by Great Britain, France and Russia. Where imperialist rule was challenged, reprisals were vicious. Kaiser Wilhelm II had urged German troops to behave like Attila's Huns in putting down the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. An international force drawn from several European countries with a vested interest in the economic exploitation of China, alongside American and Japanese troops, participated in widespread atrocities, looting and rape. According to some estimates, 100,000 Chinese fell victim to the accompanying massacres. Immense cruelty was unconstrained in some colonial territories. Between 1885 and 1908 an estimated 10 million men, women and children of the native population of the Congo - effectively a personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium - were killed in uncontrolled atrocities perpetrated by their colonial masters as they exploited the global demand for rubber. The British, involved in a bitter three-year war from 1899 to 1902 to defeat the Boers and establish their complete control in South Africa, used ruthless scorched-earth tactics to destroy enemy possessions and established what became called 'concentration camps' to intern mainly Boer women and children. A quarter of the 28,000 or so prisoners (a large proportion of them under sixteen years of age) died in the appallingly overcrowded, insanitary and disease-ridden conditions. And according to some estimates, in South-West Africa (today's Namibia) 80 per cent of the Herero and Nama peoples (perhaps some 65,000 in total) perished between 1904 and 1907. German colonial troops, in systematic retaliation for rebellion against colonial rule, had driven them into the desert where most died of thirst and hunger. Many more were worked to death in slave-labour camps (which the Germans, taking over the English nomenclature, had started to call 'concentration camps'). As international tensions between the great powers began to mount, so did pressures to rearm and, with that, recognition that the destructive capacity of new weaponry would result in warfare unlike anything so far experienced. The Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, no less, invited government representatives from twenty-six countries to a conference at The Hague in 1899 with the aim of preserving peace and limiting armaments as 'a happy overture to the century ahead'. The results - general conventions on settlement of international disputes, the laws of war, and banning of certain types of weapon for a period of five years - were soon enough proved vacuous. But they did indicate an awareness that the continuation of Europe's peaceful era could not be taken for granted, and unease about the capability of modern industrial weaponry. There was a growing sense that preventing war itself, but also the immense political and economic upheaval that would follow it, was an urgent task. The need to preserve Europe's peace, and to ensure continuing economic growth and prosperity, gained new currency. But Europe's leaders, while hoping for peace, prepared for the eventuality of war - and if there had to be war, then for a quick victory. SLITHERING INTO WAR? The British statesman David Lloyd George later famously wrote that in 1914 the nations of Europe had 'slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay'. The poignant phrase captures the unstoppable momentum towards war in the last week of July 1914, the sense that events were out of anyone's control. But it is mistaken in implying a general insouciance and lack of anxiety. Nor should it be taken to imply that war, when it came, was an accident, a tragic set of errors, an outcome desired by no one, an unforeseen and unpredictable occurrence. On the contrary, for all the genuine hopes of most decision-makers that a general conflagration could be avoided, for all the confusion, hesitation, prophecies of doom and last-minute cold feet - when it came to it, the will for war outweighed the desire for peace. Europe's leaders approached the prospect of war with their eyes wide open. Lloyd George's phrase also carries the connotation that there was no obvious drive to war, that there was general, not specific, responsibility for the disaster. Certainly, European leaders and diplomats seemed collectively to behave like lemmings heading for the cliff. Certainly, there were misunderstandings and there was general distrust - the personalities of the key decision-makers played a part here - that helped to push the European major powers over the precipice. It is also true that there was no evident drive to war by a single country, as there was to be a generation later. And certainly, all the great powers bore some responsibility for what happened. France, as the crisis was reaching boiling point, encouraged Russia's increasingly warlike stance. Britain sent out ambivalent signals, failing to act to defuse the situation rather than comply with the ever more dangerous steps that finally culminated in war. But when all this is said, the responsibility for the fateful steps into a European-wide conflagration was not evenly shared. The lion's share of the responsibility falls on those powers whose irreconcilable interests and ambitions were most geared to the risk of a general European war and whose diplomatic brinkmanship during the crisis rested ultimately on their willingness to use their military muscle. As breaking point was reached in July 1914, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia had been the decisive forces in the crisis. Germany's role was the most crucial of all. Germany combined its own ambitions to be the dominant power on the European continent with a mounting, almost paranoid, fear of Russian ascendancy and eventual hegemony. To establish the former and prevent the latter, Germany was prepared to risk a general European conflagration. On 6 July 1914 Germany gave an unconditional guarantee of support to Austria-Hungary (the 'blank cheque', as it is usually known). This was on the assumption that limited action against Serbia would swiftly follow as punishment for the murder by Serbian nationalists of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie, during a state visit to Sarajevo on 28 June. But it was only an assumption. The guarantee imposed no veto on Austria's retaliatory measures, though the danger of a wider conflict and the involvement of Europe's great powers were both evident. Germany's encouragement of an Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, delivered on 23 July and designed in advance to make acceptance impossible, was then decisive in converting an initially localized issue into a general European crisis. The ultimatum demanded action against Serbian officials and military personnel connected to the assassination plot, the arrest of two named officers, and the suppression of anti-Austrian propaganda. Most irreconcilable with protection of Serbian sovereignty were the demands that representatives from Austria-Hungary should collaborate in the investigation of the plot and the suppression of the subversive movement in Serbia. Austria-Hungary, its control over the Balkans imperilled by Serbian ascendancy and its multi-national empire increasingly under threat of disintegration, was ready to embroil Europe in war to serve its own interests, but only as long as it could rely upon German backing. The deliberately impossible terms of Austria's ultimatum to Serbia (from whose territory the 'Black Hand' terrorist organization had provided the weapons for the Sarajevo assassins) were presented in full awareness of the likelihood that Russia would back the Serbs, again greatly heightening the chances of a general European war. And Russia, anxious to prevent dominance of the Balkans by Austria-Hungary (which would have blocked Russia's own ambitions), responded precisely in this way, offering outright backing to the Serbs in the knowledge that this made war, not just against Austria-Hungary but also against Germany, more likely; and that war with Germany would inevitably draw in the French (since it was known that German war plans envisaged striking against France as well as Russia) and, most probably, the British. The high-risk strategy of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia - the willingness to escalate rather than to calm an essentially local conflict even if it meant a full-scale European war to serve their respective aims of power-politics - ultimately caused the catastrophe of 1914. And of these three powers, as noted, Germany bears especial responsibility. Without the 'blank cheque', in which Germany guaranteed its support, Austria-Hungary would not have been emboldened to issue Serbia with such an uncompromising ultimatum. And without Austrian aggressive intransigence, Russia would not have committed its support to Serbia, with all the consequences that entailed. The 'blank cheque' was the trigger that meant a general European war became more, not less, likely. In 1914 the increasingly uneasy balance among the major powers of Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, bound up in rival systems of alliance, still held, but only just. One ominous long-term development, leading to growing tension, had been the emergence during the 1890s of Germany's ambitions to become a world power. The direct challenge was to Great Britain's world-power status. Rivalry between Germany and Britain intensified. But on the continent of Europe itself a strong Germany (which had been allied with Austria-Hungary since 1879 and with Italy since 1882) posed the biggest threat to France and Russia. Common interest brought a somewhat unlikely rapprochement between the latter two countries - one a republic, the other a monarchist autocracy - which led to an alliance signed in 1894 directly aimed at neutralizing Germany's challenge. Just over a decade later, Germany's position had been strengthened by the resounding defeat in 1905 - surprising to many at the time - of Russia at the hands of Japan, the up-and-coming power in the Far East, which shook the foundations of the Tsarist Empire. The autocracy only narrowly survived the internal turmoil that followed the defeat. Remarkably, however, under shrewd economic and political management, the following years were a boom time in Russia. With the help of large French loans, the economy grew impressively. Military rebuilding made rapid progress. And long-existing hopes of gaining control over the Bosphorus at the expense of the crumbling Ottoman Empire were revived - prospects enhanced by the hugely improved relations of Russia with Britain. The two had traditionally been rivals. Britain had long been keen, to the point of war in the Crimea in 1854, to avoid Russian domination of the Turkish Straits - the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, crucial to control of the Mediterranean and entry to the Middle East - and to head off any potential threat to the vital colony of India that might arise from Russian expansion in central Asia. But Russia's weakness after the defeat by Japan brought a readiness to come to terms with Britain in a convention signed in 1907, which stipulated their respective spheres of influence in Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet - areas of potential conflict. Although this did not directly affect Germany, it certainly did so indirectly. The agreement between Russia and Britain, building upon the earlier Franco-Russian alliance and the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between France and Britain (aimed directly at German power), reshaped the structure of power-politics in Europe. Germany and its main ally, Austria-Hungary - Italy, not even a great power, even if its leaders harboured such a pretence, was a flakier ally - found themselves facing the newly created (and in the light of past enmities remarkable) entente of Britain, France and Russia. The understandable feeling within Germany that the Reich was encircled by its enemies grew ever stronger. The opposing alliances, seen by the British Foreign Office as serving (like later nuclear weaponry) as a deterrent to aggression, came to determine that when war erupted, it would be general and not localized. The alliances did not, however, cause the war. There had been a number of serious crises over the previous decade, though these had not led to war. Tension between the great powers had been fairly swiftly defused when Germany had challenged French assertions of power in Morocco in 1905, again following the peremptory Austrian annexation in 1908 of Bosnia-Herzegovina (formally still part of the Ottoman Empire, though occupied by Austria for the previous thirty years), and in 1911 after the Germans had provoked the French by sending a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir. When war did break out in the chronically unstable Balkans in 1912, as an alliance of Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece (a self-styled Balkan League) sought to take advantage of Ottoman weakness, followed by another war the next year between members of the Balkan League when Bulgaria attacked Serbia over the spoils of the first war, the great powers ensured that regional conflict did not lead to a general conflagration. The tension between the great powers was nonetheless palpable. The Balkan Wars had destabilized this combustible region even more. Another flare-up was more than likely at some point before long. Moreover, while Ottoman influence in the Balkans had long been fading, the other major power in the region, Austria-Hungary, had been perceived as passive and weak during the two wars, even when its own interests seemed threatened. It was therefore left exposed to potential further trouble in the Balkans. Russian leaders, their hopes still alive of one day controlling the Turkish Straits and of securing their western borders by possession of Galicia (the part of Poland in Austrian hands), took note of Austrian weakness. A European war was far from inevitable. But no one wanted to take chances through lack of preparation. Mutual suspicions prompted a sharp escalation of the arms race. Defence spending among the great powers was drastically increased - by 30 per cent in Germany, 50 per cent in Russia, between 1911 and 1913. Germany and Britain poured huge resources into new battle fleets in a competition to build the most formidable navy. Land armies were greatly increased in size. When the Germans extended the size of their army in 1913, the French did the same. The Russians, too, smarting from their defeat by the Japanese in 1905, had gone far towards rebuilding their army by 1913 and, as the Germans were fearfully aware, planned for a further big increase in its size. Austria-Hungary lagged behind and was not well equipped to fight anything beyond a regional war. Its quota of conscripts had been fixed in 1889, and a new law to increase this in 1913 would prove too late to close the widening gap with other armies. Even in Austria-Hungary, however, as across the continent, a remarkably high proportion of males of military age were trained for conflict. By 1914, millions of men, already serving or reservists, were ready or being made ready to fight. At full mobilization, Russia's army comprised 3.5 million men, Germany's 2.1 million, France's 1.8 million, and Austria-Hungary's 1.3 million. Great Britain was the only great power without a mass reserve conscript army. Its volunteer army of around 100,000 men, trained largely for colonial warfare, was puny compared with the size of the armies of the other great powers. But Britain had the Royal Navy, which allowed it to dominate the world's sea lanes and was the military basis of its imperial domination. It also had the potential to call upon huge numbers of recruits from its world empire. Many presumed that the checks and balances that had kept Europe essentially peaceful over the previous century would continue in place. There were others, however, who thought war would before long be unavoidable. This was not just due to the increased militarization and heightened tension. These in themselves reflected the anxieties among the great-power elites that their countries faced an existential threat and that time was running against them. That in turn meant that a serious conflagration was indeed probable at some point. At any rate, a betting man would not have wagered much on Europe's fragile peace holding indefinitely. That was even before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. Serbian nationalism had sharply intensified following the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. Radicalized nationalists, some of them army officers, had in 1911 formed a secret organization, the 'Black Hand', whose driving-force, Dragutin (known as 'Apis'), became head of Serbian military intelligence in 1913. The plot to kill the Archduke took shape within the murky networks that 'Apis' controlled. A number of Bosnian Serb youths, one of them the eventual assassin, Gavrilo Princip, were recruited to carry out the assassination. The target, Franz Ferdinand, heir to the imperial throne, far from opposing Slav minorities, wanted to give the 'South Slavs' greater powers in order to stabilize the empire. But precisely this prospect was seen by Serbian radicals as a threat to Serbian nationalist ambitions. The assassination itself followed a bizarre incident during the state visit to Sarajevo of the Archduke and his wife. The chauffeur of the Archduke's open-top limousine had taken a wrong turning up a narrow street. When the car's engine stalled as he tried to reverse, he unexpectedly presented Princip with a golden opportunity to make amends for an earlier, bungled attempt by another member of the seven-strong group of fanatical Serbian nationalists. Even so, there was no obvious reason why the murder of Franz Ferdinand (and his wife) should spark a general European war. There had been other recent assassinations, even of kings, which had not triggered a major conflict. The French President, Sadi Carnot, had been assassinated in 1894, the Italian King Umberto I had been shot dead on 29 July 1900, the Serbian King Alexander and his wife were murdered on 11 June 1903, and King George I of Greece likewise was killed on 18 March 1913. That the assassination of Franz Ferdinand should provoke a general war seemed, in fact, unlikely until almost the end of July 1914. It was over three weeks after the Sarajevo murders that the barometer of serious diplomatic tension began to rise sharply. Only in the last week of July did London's financial markets start to get jittery about the prospect of war. And even then there were still signs of confidence that the worst would be avoided. As late as 30 July the French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, remarked: 'There will be ups and downs. But it is impossible that things won't turn out all right.' The following day, 31 July, he was shot dead by a deranged ultra-nationalist who claimed Jaurès was a traitor who had to be killed. His 'treason' had been to strive for international peace. An obvious Austrian response to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand would have been to gain 'satisfaction' through a short retributive attack to 'chastise' Serbia - held responsible for the assassination - whose army had been seriously weakened by losses in the recent Balkan Wars. The other powers would most likely have accepted this as a reasonable retaliation for the killing of the heir to the Habsburg throne. There was indeed almost a presumption that this would be a natural and justified reaction. In Vienna, but not just there, retaliation was regarded as a matter of prestige, necessary to confirm the status of the Habsburg monarchy as a great power. About three weeks after the assassination German leaders in particular thought that a localized war would be the outcome. But even such a limited action would have taken too long to organize. The cumbersome governmental, diplomatic and military machinery of the multi-national empire took time to crank into gear. While the hawkish Chief of the General Staff, Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, supported by the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Leopold Berchtold, pressed for immediate war against Serbia, the head of government in the Hungarian half of the empire, Count István Tisza, urged caution, fearing 'the dreadful calamity of a European war'. This lack of unity among the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the very reason that a guarantee of German backing was sought. The Austrians thought the German army was invincible; German backing was a solid guarantee, even if a European war were to arise from action against Serbia. And the Austrians had the impression from Berlin that if war was unavoidable, the timing could not be more propitious. However, the Habsburg Empire knew only two speeds: slow and dead-stop. Many of the men needed for service in the army were at the time even more urgently required to get in the harvest. So an immediate response was impossible. It was pointed out, already two days after the assassination, that at least a further sixteen days would be necessary to mobilize the armed forces for a strike against Serbia. As it was, the protracted Austrian response amounted to a slow-burning fuse that eventually prompted all the great powers to become involved. As the crisis deepened, actions were influenced by mentalities, aims, ambitions and fears that had been long in the making. Germany, a country united only since 1871 but with the strongest industrial economy on the continent, was ambitious, keen to acquire its 'place in the sun', to become a world power that could rival the British Empire in status and influence. At the same time Germany was most fearful that time was not in its favour and that the combined military might of its enemies threatened to block its ambitions. The Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, had already made clear as early as 1912, in the Kaiser's presence, that he saw war as inevitable, 'and the sooner the better'. He recommended that the press stir up anti-Russian feeling to make war popular when it came. Moltke remained the leading proponent of a preventive war - an early strike before Germany could itself be attacked, by Russia, France, or both in concert. In the weeks before the war, he continued to argue that Germany had to make sure that war, certain to break out anyway, should take place while it was in a position to win. Russia would have completed its armaments programme within two or three years, he was reported as saying in May 1914, and the military might of Germany's enemies would then be so great that he did not know how it could be mastered. The only option, he concluded, was 'to carry out a preventive war to smash the enemy as long as we could still to some extent prove successful in the struggle'. But the gloomy, pessimistic Moltke, though holding the most crucial post in the German military hierarchy, did not determine government policy. And Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, had real and growing anxieties about the consequences of a war. He saw it as a 'leap in the dark', and to be undertaken only as the 'gravest duty'. He even predicted, counter to what some German hawks were claiming, that war, far from destroying social democracy and eliminating its threat to the existing social order, would in fact strengthen it, 'and will topple many a throne'. Towards the end of July, as the crisis moved into its final phase and his own political initiatives had recognizably failed, Bethmann-Hollweg tried 'to apply the brakes with all his energy' as he visibly lost ground to the military leadership. Even so, his mind was not closed to the General Staff's argument that Germany's military position could only become less favourable over time, while Russia's would become immeasurably stronger, and that it was better, therefore, to have the war 'now rather than later', while victory could be quickly attained, than to wait and watch conditions worsen. Since Russia was allied with France, Germany's great enemy to the west, the fear of encirclement had by this time become pervasive. The civilian, not military, leadership of Germany still retained the controlling hand on policy decisions until the Russian mobilization on 30 July, by which time war had become inevitable. In no other European country, even so, had the military such a degree of autonomy from the civilian government as in Germany. And when the crisis reached its climax at the end of July, the influence of Moltke and the General Staff proved decisive. Military imperatives took over from political initiative. The Kaiser, seeming at times to agree with Moltke's analysis, was, for all his belligerent bluster, a waverer who got cold feet during the crisis and sought at the last minute to back away from war. But the Kaiser was, in fact, in no position to control forces far more powerful than he was. German military planning was rigid in its long-standing strategy to defeat the French swiftly before turning on the Russians. So when on 30 July the Kaiser demanded that Moltke call off the attack on France (hoping this would ensure British neutrality) and redirect the entire army to face the Russians, his Chief of Staff replied in no uncertain terms that this could not be done. It would turn the well-trained army into little more than a 'chaotic rabble'. Army deployment, Moltke declared, was the result of years of planning and could not be improvised at short notice. During the crisis, far from dictating policy, the Kaiser could only react to the decisions of his government and, ultimately, to the imperatives of his military. Until Moltke's stance was finally accepted, as events reached their climax at the end of July, the actions of the German government had been shaped by its earlier grave policy mistake - giving a free hand to Austria in dealing with the Serbian crisis - which had itself opened up the real risk of a European conflagration. This colossal error meant that Germany spent July mainly responding to events that were shaped by others - events that were rapidly spiralling beyond anyone's control. Russian long-term interests were directed towards control of the Balkans and the Turkish Straits, vital to Russia's trade and, since they controlled access to the Black Sea, to its security in the south. No other power could be allowed to dominate the region. As the weakness of the Ottoman Empire became increasingly evident, the main threat to Russian interests in the Balkans plainly came from Austria-Hungary. Hawkish elements in the Russian naval leadership even mooted an early war to seize Constantinople (as the Russians still called Istanbul) and the Straits before the Turks acquired the five new Dreadnoughts they had on order (from the British). But such notions played little or no part in shaping Russian action during the July crisis. Russia's military preparations were not targeted for completion before 1917. No imminent showdown with Germany was contemplated in 1914 - until, that is, the terms of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia became known on 24 July. From that point on, Russia's backing for Serbia meant the descent into a general European war was as good as impossible to halt. Considerations of prestige alone meant that no side could consider backing down. Austria-Hungary, the weakest in the triad of major powers whose actions paved the way for war during July 1914, acted largely out of fear for its own future. The instability in the Balkans (enhanced by the erosion of Ottoman influence), the worries of losing dominance in the region to the Russians (known to harbour bitter resentment at the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzogovina in 1908), and the growing assertiveness of Serbia, with the shadow of Russian support behind it, caused great anxieties in the corridors of power in Vienna. Crushing Serbia was, therefore, a tempting proposition in July 1914 - as long as German support was guaranteed and a limited war could be successfully, and quickly, executed. But quick retaliatory action for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was not taken. Instead, the ultimatum of 23 July invited the involvement of Russia (and with that Germany and France) into the festering conflict. Germany had voiced its unconditional support for Austrian action against Serbia, seen as entirely justified, as early as 6 July. Serbia would either back down or be militarily punished. The position of Germany's main ally in the Balkans would be strengthened as a result. It was not thought that Russia would intervene. The Tsar would surely not back assassins of royalty? And Russia, it was believed, was still militarily unprepared for war. The other powers would look on and accept the fait accompli. How shaky the German political calculations were would soon become clear. That they might indeed prove a serious miscalculation, and that they involved a great risk, was, however, recognized at the very time that the 'blank cheque' was issued. The Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, no less, acknowledged that 'an action against Serbia can lead to world war', and that this would turn 'everything that exists upside-down'. Further foot-dragging in Vienna meant that German hopes of a speedy outcome to a localized crisis were effectively doomed from the start. The text of a tough ultimatum to the Serbs was not finalized until 19 July, and a further four days elapsed before it was presented. It was by now three and a half weeks since the murders in Sarajevo. Another forty-eight hours were to be allowed for the Serbian response. Remarkably, fearing the worst from an Austrian attack, the Serbs had initially been prepared to bow to the harsh terms. That was before the Russians, aware for days through a leak of the uncompromising terms of the ultimatum, stiffened Serbian resolve. Russian leaders had themselves been encouraged to take a hard line with Austria and to stand by Serbia, whatever the consequences, through the firm assurances of support from their French ally during the state visit to St Petersburg of President Poincaré and Prime Minister Viviani between 20 and 23 July. The French President, who had as a boy experienced the Prussian invasion of his native Lorraine, had his own anti-German axes to grind. He had supported the notion of Russian intervention in the Balkans in 1912, aware that it could bring about conflict with Germany. Then, as now, a weakening of Germany's position in Europe through a military clash with Russia was in the French interest. In 1912 Russia had chosen to keep out of the Balkan conflict. This time policy-makers in St Petersburg thought it would be a mistake to hold back. Russia's strategic aims would be advanced by support for Serbia. If that meant war, then, with Germany committed to fighting on two fronts, the hawkish elements in the Russian leadership believed it was a war that Russia would win. That decision itself meant that options quickly narrowed. From the delivery of the Austrian ultimatum, events moved fast. A general war started to become more, not less, likely. Even then it could have been stopped. But there was not the will to prevent it. 'That means European war' was the immediate response next day of the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov, to the Austrian ultimatum. Shortly afterwards, Sazonov accused the Austrians of deliberately provoking war, telling their ambassador: 'You are setting fire to Europe.' However, as Sazonov knew only too well, the Russians' own actions were markedly ratcheting up the chances of inflaming conditions on the continent. Even before the Austrian ultimatum had expired, already on 24 July Russia had withdrawn all deposits of state funds in Berlin (amounting to 100 million rubles). More significantly, it had taken the decision to begin in secret the partial mobilization of the army (amounting to over a million men) and the Baltic and Black Sea fleets of the navy. By 25 July the so-called 'Period Preparatory to War' had started. Troop movements quickly made the Germans aware of the secret mobilization, even though it was not formally announced until 28 July. That was the date on which Austria finally declared war on Serbia. The momentum for general war now proved unstoppable. Frantic and futile last-ditch diplomatic manoeuvres, some more genuine than others, were made to head off the descent into a full-scale European war. It was too late. German hopes that Austrian action against Serbia could be contained and localized had long since evaporated. Even so, five days after the Russian decision to begin mobilization in secret, Germany had yet to take any decisive military steps. On 29 July there was still hesitation in Berlin about ordering a 'State of Imminent Danger of War' (the last step before full-scale mobilization). But that evening the Russian leadership decided upon general mobilization. The following day, 30 July, after a delay when the Tsar first confirmed then, in a bout of nerves, cancelled the order, he agreed to full mobilization. Military imperatives now finally overrode diplomatic considerations in Berlin. A 'State of Imminent Danger of War' was declared on 31 July. A central German concern was to ensure that the Social Democrats, whose spectrum of support embraced strong pacifist strains, would support war. It was essential, therefore, that Germany should be seen to be forced into a defensive war. The Russian general mobilization provided this justification. Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg expressed satisfaction that the Russians would now appear the guilty party, before adding fatalistically: 'things are out of control and the stone has started to roll'. At midnight on 31 July Germany issued a twelve-hour ultimatum to Russia stipulating German general mobilization if Russia refused to withdraw its mobilization order. When the ultimatum expired on 1 August, with no action taken in St Petersburg, Germany declared war on Russia. France mobilized in support of Russia the same day. Two days later, 3 August, Germany declared war on France. Great Britain, preoccupied more by the prospect of civil war in Ireland than the mounting crisis on the continent, had not been among the hawks as the pressure for war grew. Of all the major powers, Britain had least to gain from a European war. The country's leaders were more than aware that, as Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, had put it on 23 July, war would 'involve the expenditure of so vast a sum of money and such an interference with trade' that it would result in 'a complete collapse of European credit and industry'. 'Irrespective of who were the victors in the war, many things would be completely swept away,' he added, prophetically. Most of the British cabinet, like Grey, feared the consequences of war and hoped that peace could be preserved. During the following week the Foreign Secretary tried, hesitantly, to explore possibilities of a mediated settlement to the crisis. The terms of the entente with Russia and France did not bind Britain to intervention, and Grey continued to hedge British bets. A firm British declaration of neutrality, which the Germans were hoping for (though not expecting), might even at a late hour have prevented general war. But Grey's disastrous hesitation meant that the room for diplomatic initiatives vanished. And, ultimately, Britain could not take the risk of German domination of the continent. This was the chief reason why Britain was ready to fight. Moreover, there were those in the British government and also among the opposition who saw support for France and Russia as a matter of honour and prestige. Britain could not afford to stand aside from a major war, argued Sir Eyre Crowe, an influential voice in the Foreign Office, without seeing its standing as a great power diminished. In the end, when German troops crossed the border into neutral Belgium and a British ultimatum demanding Germany respect Belgian neutrality was disregarded at midnight on 4 August, it provided the occasion for Britain to declare war. Ironically, Austria-Hungary, the state whose actions had precipitated the crisis, was the last of the great powers to enter the conflict, declaring war on Russia only on 6 August. France declared war on Austria-Hungary five days after that, and Britain, finally, a day later still. Serbia, which had initially sparked the conflict, would not face war on its own soil for another fourteen months. But Serbia was by now a sideshow. The main event was about to begin. Behind these fateful steps into war lay fear. Each of the powers harboured fears for its own future. These were partially shaped by internal pressures for democratization and socialism or, particularly in Austria's case, by shrill nationalist demands that, it was feared, could (and indeed would) end by splintering the empire. But the great powers were in the main highly fearful of each other. Germany feared encirclement by its enemies, France and Russia. It especially feared Russia and the consequences of the military might of the Tsarist regime overtaking its own, including future Russian domination of the Balkans, seen as vital to its own expanding influence. Russia in turn feared German control over the Balkans, the Near East, and over its crucial economic lifeline through the Bosphorus. France, invaded by Prussia only a little over forty years earlier, in 1870, harboured an almost paranoid fear of Germany. Britain feared the loss of its commercial dominance and German supremacy in Europe. German control of the Belgian and French coast, just across the Channel, was an intolerable thought. Fear drove the arms race. It also drove the readiness to act before it was too late, to seize the opportunity before the enemy did, to grasp the moment. And common to all the great powers was fear of loss of face from backing away from the brink. The readiness to risk war was encouraged by the belief on all sides that it would be short. Perhaps it was less belief than hope dressed up as expectation, avoiding consideration of what would happen should it not be the case. Few decision-makers in each country - no more than a handful of individuals in every case - voiced apprehension about the grave consequences of war. Whatever their inner fears, they acted as if the war would be short. It was not that the leaders of European countries, or their military advisers, were ignorant about the highly destructive capacity of modern artillery or the high death-toll to be expected in a new war by sending infantry out to face machine-gun fire. The American Civil War had, decades earlier, given a foretaste of the heavy death tolls that could be expected. But little notice had been taken of this in Europe. Nor did the 184,000 dead in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 send any strong message. If anything, it suggested that the sheer destructiveness of modern warfare would bring quick results. After all, though that war lasted for ten months, the key battle, at Sedan, had taken place after only six weeks. More recently, observers had widely reported the high casualties in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5. But this war had also been short - not much longer than a year. Based on relatively recent experience, another short war could be anticipated. So instead of being deterred by the prospect of a long drawn-out conflict and slaughterous stalemate, military thinkers in Europe were sufficiently impressed by advances in fire-power technology to imagine that a rapid, mobile offensive, even if accompanied by heavy casualties, would bring about a quick victory. German military strategists, in particular, operated along such lines. A lengthy war of attrition, they acknowledged, had to be avoided at all costs, given an enemy alliance superior in numbers and the potential throttling of the German war effort by a British naval blockade. The German General Staff, responsible for military planning, concluded, therefore, that the speedier and more devastating the offensive, the likelier it would be that the enemy would be overrun before it could mobilize adequate defence forces in time - and the sooner, therefore, the war would be over. Moltke adapted a variant of the plan laid down by his predecessor as Chief of the General Staff, General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, in 1905, which started from a premise of war on two fronts but aimed to move westwards first and at speed to knock out the French with a rapid offensive of enormous force, turning to defeat the enemy in the east before the Russians could attack. Schlieffen had thought a breakthrough to victory would be possible within about a month. But the French were hardly unaware of the danger, and, with a field army of comparable size, were preparing to meet attack with huge offensives of their own. The Russians also thought in terms of a swift, decisive offensive, into Austrian Galicia (an offensive against the Germans in East Prussia was, to the chagrin of the French, subordinate to this main aim) to reach the Carpathians. The Austrians, too, imagined that attack was the best form of defence. Yet they recognized that, while they could take on the Serbs, moving against the Russians could only be undertaken in tandem with a devastating German assault on the eastern foe. Each of the continental adversaries presumed the primacy of the offensive. That, they believed, was the way to decisive - and quick - victory. There was no fallback position. What would happen if speedy victory were not attained did not bear contemplation. It could only mean a long attritional war, and ultimate victory to the alliance with the greater economic as well as military capacity. The belief that war was necessary and justified, and the self-consoling presumption that it would be short - a brief, exciting and heroic adventure - with victory swift and casualties few, went far beyond Europe's ruling classes and penetrated into wide sections of the population. It helps to explain why so many people in each of the belligerent countries were so enthusiastic, even euphoric, as tension - not experienced at grass-roots level before the last week of July - built up and finally burst into full-scale war. To be sure, such a belief was far from universal, and the enthusiasm far more limited than first impressions might suggest. In fact, there was a wide spectrum of emotions, differing among countries, regions, social classes and political allegiances, ranging from pro-war hysteria to fervent anti-war pacifism, from gung-ho exhilaration to deep anxiety. But there is no denying the widespread jubilation in at least some parts of the population of Europe's great capitals at the imminent prospect of war. In Vienna the British ambassador reported 'vast crowds' in a 'frenzy of delight' parading through the streets 'singing patriotic songs till the small hours of the morning' when relations with Serbia were broken off. The Austrian pacifist writer Stefan Zweig later recalled how he had been captivated by an atmosphere in the city transformed into patriotic enthusiasm. 'There were parades in the street, flags, ribbons, and music burst forth everywhere, young recruits were marching triumphantly, their faces lighting up the cheering.' Zweig found his 'hatred and aversion for war' temporarily overcome by what he saw as 'majestic, rapturous, and even seductive'. The 'war mood', once the view that it would be a fight for protection against Tsarist tyranny had been accepted, also predominated over the initial protests in Austrian socialist ranks at moves that threatened peace. In Berlin some 50,000 citizens - mainly middle-class and students - gathered in front of the royal palace on 31 July, as news broke of Russian mobilization, to hear the Kaiser state that 'in the struggle ahead I know no parties among my people any longer. There are among us now only Germans.' In pubs, cafés and beer gardens, people rose to sing patriotic songs. Young men paraded in the streets, demanding war. In other German cities, too, there were jubilant demonstrations in favour of war. From the balcony of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, Tsar Nicholas greeted a huge, cheering crowd which, as if following orders, knelt before him, waving their banners and singing the national anthem. In Paris there was an outpouring of patriotic fervour as President Poincaré proclaimed the overcoming of internal divisions in a 'sacred union' of Frenchmen. Socialists joined in. Working-class anger at the assassination of Jaurès was directed by the external threat into the need for patriotic duty and defiance against German aggression. At the root of such extraordinary emotions, years of nationalist indoctrination in schools and universities, during military service, in patriotic organizations and lobby-groups, and in the popular press had done their job. In the upper and middle classes, especially, and among intellectuals and students, nationalist fervour was widely prevalent. For many, too, war was welcome as national regeneration, as a liberation from the perceived moral decadence of contemporary society. The Italian Futurist Manifesto had expressed this graphically and radically in 1909: 'We want to glorify war, the only source of hygiene in the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive act.' War was seen as heroic, adventurous, manly - the antidote to national decline. There was a sense of national unity, with internal divisions temporarily overcome. For German intellectuals, the new unity seemed the embodiment of 'the spirit of 1914', almost a sense of religious awakening. It reinforced their feeling that German culture was not simply different from, but was superior to, French civilization with its roots in revolution and republicanism, let alone the materialistic democracy of Britain. The values of the superior culture had to be defended and, if need be, enforced upon the rest of Europe. Neither this lofty, intellectualized sense of superiority, nor the broader enthusiasm for war, accurately or fully represented attitudes. The jubilation at the prospect of war was largely confined to big towns and cities. Even there, it was far from universal. In London the pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell later claimed to have witnessed with amazement 'that average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war'. Contemporary indicators, however, pointed to a prevalent mood in London and other parts of Britain of anxiety and nervousness rather than jingoistic enthusiasm, which seems to have been largely confined to parts of the middle class, especially youths. The patriotic fervour of groups of students in the centre of Berlin found no echo among the workers of industrial districts of the city. Anti-war feeling - at any rate, anxiety at the prospect of war coupled with the desire to maintain peace - predominated there. In the countryside, too, war enthusiasm had little currency. It was reported that 'many of our peasant families are weighed down with great sorrow', and that the rural population felt little to cheer about when fathers, sons, brothers or grandsons might lose their lives. Russian peasants often had no idea what they were being asked to fight for. In French villages there was shock, pessimism and fatalistic acceptance of the requirements of duty, but no sign of wild jubilation at Poincaré's declaration of 'sacred union'. Within the industrial working class, too, particularly among workers associated with socialist parties and trade unions - strongly internationalist and tending towards pacifism - jingoistic ultra-nationalism and outright enthusiasm for war were relatively little in evidence. But even here there was as good as no opposition to the war. Resistance to conscription was minimal in every country. A sense of duty, or fatalistic acceptance, sufficed even where enthusiasm was lacking. Only 1.5 per cent of those mobilized in France resisted the call-up. The government had reckoned with a figure of 13 per cent. German trade unionists agreed to suspend strike action during the war. Socialists in the German, French and British parliaments voted to back government funding of the war. In Russia the socialists abstained (though the five Bolshevik members of the Duma did vote against and were later arrested). What won supporters of international socialism to back nationalistic war was the belief that the war was defensive, and unavoidable. It was seen as a war that had reluctantly to be fought - and for freedom, not imperialist domination. Later generations would look back and see the war as a pointless squandering of human life on an immense scale. In August 1914 it did not seem pointless at all. Workers were ready to fight - and die - for their country alongside their compatriots and Allies in what they saw as a righteous war of self-defence against aggression from foreign enemies. As army conscripts they had been indoctrinated in patriotism and discipline. They now turned out to be patriots first, socialists second. In Germany defence against the forces of the detested Tsarist autocracy motivated and united socialists. The Social Democrats had staged big anti-war rallies in German cities, attended in all by an estimated half a million peace-demonstrators, in the last days of July. They were nevertheless anxious to emphasize that workers were ready to defend the Fatherland in its hour of need. That need was a 'war against Tsarism'. When Germany declared war following Russian mobilization, the mood switched abruptly to one of patriotic defence. German-speaking socialists in Austria backed the war for the same reason. Russian socialists, too, ignoring the Bolshevik anti-war stance, rallied round the cause of defence of 'Mother Russia' against Germans viewed as 'trampling on all the rules of humanity'. Strikes were halted, pacifists and internationalists forced into exile. French socialists felt the same about defence of the patrie against invasion by the hated Germans. The British Labour Party also accepted that the war had to be fought till Germany was defeated. Newspapers in every country whipped up anti-foreigner hysteria. Some people, to their credit, resisted it. But vivid imagination, inspired by the media, conjured up spies and fifth columnists everywhere. Anyone with a foreign accent or name was at risk. Those whose Germanic accent betrayed that they were from Alsace could find themselves attacked by Frenchmen. Two women overheard speaking French in Munich had to be rescued by the police. Patriotic mobs in St Petersburg wrecked the German embassy and looted German shops. The Tsar changed the name of the Russian capital to Petrograd in response to the frenzy. St Petersburg sounded too German. Over a quarter of a million men rushed to volunteer in Germany in the first days of August - an impressive number given that almost the entire male population was covered by conscription, which exempted only persons under seventeen or over fifty years of age. In Britain, the only major power without conscription, 300,000 men volunteered for service in August, another 450,000 in September 1914. Many workmates and neighbours in industrial towns and cities joined up together, and were formed into 'Pals battalions'. Social pressure to enlist was intense. Even so, as in other countries, and when every qualification has been made, the widespread enthusiasm was unmistakable and opposition minimal. At its outset, this was a popular war. In each belligerent country, soldiers departing for the front were waved off from train stations by cheering crowds. The tearful farewells of mothers, wives and children were accompanied by patriotic songs and heady expressions of swift victory and early reunion. But many, perhaps most, of those reservists going off to fight, whatever outward show they put on for their families and friends, were leaving their homes, farms, offices and workplaces with some reluctance, and with some apprehension. They were consoling themselves, as well as their loved ones, with the dream that it would 'all be over by Christmas'. Few were as clear-sighted in their forebodings as the Austrian politician and historian Josef Redlich, as he watched thousands of reservists board trains for the front in Vienna's north station on 3 August 1914: 'The weeping mothers, wives and brides: what misery awaits them.' Mobilization followed railway timetables. The Germans had 11,000 trains, the French 7,000, timetabled to take their troops to the front. Horses too - enormous numbers of them - had to be ferried to the fighting lines. The Austrians, Germans and Russians between them mobilized close to 2.5 million horses, the British and French hundreds of thousands more. In their dependence on horsepower, the armies of 1914 had changed little from Napoleon's time. Uniforms had meanwhile become mostly drab khaki or grey. But the French went to war still wearing the bright blue tunics, red trousers and red-and-blue hats that belonged to an earlier age. And no soldier's kitbag in August 1914 included a protective steel helmet - issued to French and British soldiers only in 1915, to German troops the following year - or a gas mask, soon to be a necessary, if inadequate, protection against a new and deadly weapon. The armies that went to war in 1914 were nineteenth-century armies. They were about to fight a twentieth-century war. 2 The Great Disaster Silent crowds of people . . . The regiments march past with their bands; remember that all these men are on their way to the slaughter. Diary of Michel Corday, a civil servant, Paris (14 July 1915) After August 1914 nothing could be the same again. The new century was already fourteen years old. But the outbreak of what soon came to be known as 'the Great War' marked the real beginning of Europe's Twentieth Century. The years between the calendar date that registered the start of the century and the slide into calamitous war belonged to an earlier era. What came after August 1914 was the start of a new, more terrible, age. A TRAGEDY UNFOLDS Two years before the war, a Hamburg schoolteacher and anti-war writer, Wilhelm Lamszus, had grimly portrayed the horror and brutality of the well-oiled killing machines that would produce death on an unheard-of scale in a coming war in his novel entitled Das Menschenschlachthaus (The Human Slaughterhouse). It was a tragically apt prophecy. Eight years later, Ernst Jünger, a passionately committed German officer who had served enthusiastically and with great courage as a troop leader at the front throughout almost the entire war, called his best-seller, one of the most extraordinary literary works on the First World War, In Stahlgewittern (In Storms of Steel). He could have found no more appropriate title for what confronted the soldiers of Europe's countries at war over the next four years. Both literary works, from before and after the catastrophic conflict, capture aspects of the war's essential character. More than any previous war, this was a war of industrialized mass slaughter. Human flesh stood against killing machines. Facing soldiers were heavy artillery, machine guns, quick-firing rifles, trench mortars, high explosives, grenades, flamethrowers and poison gas. Modern weapons deployed in ever greater numbers inflicted impersonalized death and destruction on an unprecedented scale. The colossal loss of human life was taken on board in the planning of massive offensives. Artillery and shrapnel were the most frequent agents of death on the battlefield, but countless thousands died of wounds and disease contracted through the atrocious battlefield conditions. War as the driver of technological change introduced novel weaponry and methods of mass killing that marked the face of the future. Poison gas came into wide use from 1915 onwards after the Germans had deployed it in the spring of that year during the attack on Allied positions near Ypres. Tanks made their debut on the Somme as part of the British offensive in 1916 and by 1918 were being used in major battlefield formations. Submarines became from 1915 onwards a significant weapon in the German campaign against Allied shipping and changed the nature of the war at sea. Not least, rapid development of aircraft technology exposed civilians of towns and cities as well as fighting forces at the fronts to the terrifying prospect of aerial bombardment, of which the bombs dropped on Liège in Belgium by a German Zeppelin airship as early as 6 August 1914 were a foretaste. In their exposure to bombing, and in many other ways, civilians would from now on be incorporated in the war effort as never before, both in working for the war effort and as enemy targets. War propaganda used the mass media to instil hatred of entire peoples. Belligerent states mobilized their populations in new ways. War was becoming total. The French press coined the term 'la guerre totale' - total war - in 1917 to capture the fact that front and homeland were bound together in the war effort. Moreover, though Europe was its epicentre, the war was for the first time a truly global conflict, affecting every continent. In part this reflected the global empires of Britain, especially, and France. Both mobilized their empires for war. The British dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa entered the war in support of Britain in August 1914. Africans and Indians were enlisted to fight in a European cause, with high death rates. One million Indians fought on the Allied side, many of them in Africa and the Middle East. France enlisted over 600,000 men from its colonies, mainly in west and north Africa. Over 2 million Africans served as soldiers and labourers. Around 10 per cent of them did not survive. The death rate among labourers - deployed in huge numbers in east Africa to carry heavy supplies - was about twice that level, higher than the death rate for British soldiers during the war. Like most wars, this one proved easier to start than to stop. Instead of being home for Christmas, as they had told their loved ones (and themselves) they would be, over a quarter of a million French soldiers by then lay dead. Total casualties (dead, wounded and captured) had gone beyond 450,000 already by the end of November. British losses by then were 90,000, more than had initially been recruited to fight. Austro-Hungarian casualties numbered over 300,000 in the very first battles, against the Russians in Galicia in August and September, and half a million men overall within the first five months of the war on the eastern front. Germany had lost 800,000 men by the end of the year, 116,000 of them killed (more than four times its total dead in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71). Russian losses in the first phase of the war were the highest of all. In the first nine months Russia lost just short of 2 million men, 764,000 of them captured. The casualties of the belligerent forces were higher in 1914, relative to the size of the armies, than at any other time of the war. The inclusion of the civilian population in the killing, as the Germans attacked through Belgium, began immediately. Over six thousand civilians - including women and children - were killed, brutally maltreated or deported as German troops passed through Belgium in the first weeks of the war. German military training had instilled in soldiers a paranoid fear of guerrilla warfare. The soldiers, often consumed by hatred, viewed the civilians as collectively to blame for supposed (and mainly imaginary) actions of snipers or for incidents in which 'friendly fire' was mistaken for enemy attacks from behind. The collective 'punishment' was inflicted even when the soldiers knew that their victims were innocent. When, at the crucial battle of the Marne, fought on 6-9 September, the French halted the German advance little over 50 kilometres from Paris, the entire strategy for rapid victory based on the Schlieffen Plan (by which the Germans had hoped swiftly to defeat the French before turning on the Russians) had failed. In the west, the time for swift offensives was over. Defence was the order of the day. Troops on both sides dug in and started to construct trenches - at first primitive, later becoming far more elaborate defensive formations. Before long these ran in an almost unbroken line from the Channel coast to the Swiss borders. Vast numbers of troops had to adjust to an unspeakable existence in the trenches - vermin-ridden quagmires of mud, built in zig-zagging rows, fronted by big reels of barbed wire, with adjunct trenches leading back to supply depots and field hospitals. By the end of September the stalemate on the western front that would last a further four long years, until 1918, was in place. The immense early losses did not persuade any of the belligerent powers to try to end the war. They all had huge reserves of men to fall back upon. Since strategic thinking in essence on all sides amounted to wearing the enemy down until it was no longer able to fight, and since the main way to achieve this attritional end entailed pouring ever more manpower onto the battlefields to undertake ever greater offensives against well-entrenched defensive lines, the colossal bloodletting was set to continue indefinitely. In the east, where the war, over a much longer and less densely populated front, never became so immobilized as on the western front, the situation had developed in more promising fashion for the Central Powers. Under the command of General Paul von Hindenburg, brought out of retirement and backed by an able, if sometimes impetuous, Chief of Staff of the Eighth Army, Major General Erich Ludendorff, in late August the Germans inflicted a heavy defeat on the Russian Second Army near Tannenberg in East Prussia. Germans were fighting on home soil here, repelling a Russian incursion. What they saw of Russian devastation during the fortnight's occupation of part of East Prussia confirmed existing anti-Russian prejudice and contributed to the ferocity of the fighting. Russian losses were high - almost 100,000 in all, 50,000 dead or wounded, another 50,000 taken prisoner. Only a short time later, between 8 and 15 September, in the battle of the Masurian Lakes, the Russians lost a further 100,000 men, 30,000 of them taken prisoner. Farther south, facing the Austrians, they had greater success in their attack on Galicia. The Austrians had found themselves overwhelmed by far larger Russian forces by 3 September, suffering huge losses and being forced into a humiliating retreat. As with the Germans in Belgium, the belief - largely misplaced - that civilians were participating in attacks on troops fed the brutality that accompanied the Russian occupation of Galicia. Jews - Galicia had a Jewish population of almost a million - were particularly singled out. Cossacks were at the forefront of much of the violence. Large numbers of Jews, anticipating their plight, fled as the Russians advanced. Pogroms perpetrated by the invaders began as early as mid-August. Hundreds of Jews were killed as the occupiers' violence escalated. Robbery and rape were commonplace. Jewish villages were burnt down. Over a thousand Jews were taken hostage by the Russian army and released only on payment by extortion. Jewish property was confiscated. Up to 50,000 Jews - and as many non-Jews - were deported to Russia in the summer of 1915, many of them ending up in Siberia or Turkestan. The Austrians had to endure yet another embarrassing defeat in the early weeks of the war, and this time not at the hands of another 'great power', but inflicted by the very country that had been at the core of the crisis that had spilled over into European war: Serbia. The campaign to 'chastise' Serbia for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been all but forgotten by the other belligerent powers by the time Austrian troops belatedly launched their infantry offensive on 12 August 1914. The 'punitive expedition' was not expected to last long. And at first it looked as if the Austrians would soon be entering Belgrade. But a counter-offensive by poorly armed but highly motivated Serbs managed after three days of ferocious combat to force the Austrians back. Heavy casualties were registered on both sides. Up to 10,000 Austrians were killed, three times that number wounded. Serbian casualties numbered 3,000-5,000 dead and 15,000 wounded. An exaggerated fear of snipers and of a hostile civilian population prepared to engage in guerrilla warfare against the troops prompted the Austrians to act with notable brutality. The number of civilian victims - most of them summarily executed - is estimated at around 3,500. The war was set to widen. On 29 October Turkish ships, without provocation, attacked Russian naval bases in the Black Sea. When the Russians responded by declaring war on Turkey in early November, Turkish troops invaded Russia through the Caucasus, but by the end of the year were forced back. The defeat cost them at least 75,000 men, dead as much from disease and cold as through Russian arms. But the Turks enjoyed a major triumph the following year, 1915. This was in repelling an ill-fated, badly planned, ineptly executed attempt by the Allies, instigated by Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty (in effect, minister for the British Navy), to invade Turkey by landing a large force at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles in April of that year. Almost half a million Allied soldiers - including Indian, Australian, New Zealand, French and Senegalese troops - took part in the Gallipoli campaign. Turkish defence of the homeland, which established the heroic reputation of its commander, Mustapha Kemal Pasha (later better known as Atatürk), was ferocious and the heavily fortified shore proved impenetrable. For the Allies, it was an unmitigated disaster. By December, when they were forced to abort the operation and begin evacuation, their casualties were close to a quarter of a million, with around 50,000 dead (many of disease). The Turks lost a similar number. The crisis faced by Turkey in 1915 motivated the worst atrocities during the First World War, in a region where horrific massacres built on competing territorial claims, ethnic conflict and religious antagonism between Muslim Turks and Kurds and Christian Armenians in eastern Anatolia had already been a dire part of pre-war history. The radical nationalist leadership, in control of Turkish domestic policy since a coup d'état in 1913, was already before the war seeking greater ethnic and religious homogeneity within Turkey. The large Armenian minority obviously posed an obstacle to this. War between the Ottoman and Russian empires had then sharply intensified tensions in the border regions of Anatolia and the Caucasus. Tension between Turks and Armenians in particular now reached near fever pitch. Armenians, straddling the Russian border and hoping to free themselves from Turkish rule, mainly sympathized with Russia. They saw the war as the dawning of their day. They were encouraged by the Russians, and through spies in St Petersburg the Turks were aware of plans to provoke an Armenian uprising. This spelled danger to the Turks, not least because Armenians lived in a region of vital strategic importance. Turkish leaders saw them as collaborators with their enemies and as a threat to their war plans. The Armenians, beset by violent localized attacks, viewed collaboration with Russia as their best defence against worse massacres. But when an Armenian rebellion began in the city of Van in mid-April 1915, accompanied by atrocities on all sides, by Armenians, Turks and Kurds, no help from the Russians was forthcoming. The Armenians were on their own. The Turks, faced with the western Allies attacking through the Dardanelles, paranoid at the threat posed by the Russians through the Caucasus, and viewing the Armenian minority as a Russian Trojan Horse, were ready to inflict savage reprisals. And the war had provided the opportunity to pursue the ideological goal of ethnic homogenization. Deportations began soon after the uprising, rapidly escalating in scale and accompanying violence. Within weeks, the Turkish leadership had ordered the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia - around a million and a half - to be deported to the heart of the Syrian desert. Many died from disease or maltreatment during deportation or in camps when they arrived. Many more died in horrific massacres, part of a terrible murderous programme, backed by Turkish leaders. Estimates of the numbers of Armenian dead range between 600,000 and over a million. Despite increasing Allied superiority to the German army in troop numbers on the western front, an end to the stalemate was in the meantime nowhere in sight. The German Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn (who had replaced Moltke the previous September) set his hopes, therefore, on the east. Forcing the Russians to come to terms, he thought, was the key to winning the war in the west. In the east, however, Germany had to cope with the ever more apparent military weakness of its main ally, Austria-Hungary. During a disastrous Austrian offensive in the depth of winter 1914-15 in the mountainous heights of the Carpathians some 800,000, including the last well-trained reserves, were lost. Many froze to death or succumbed to illness. Tens of thousands went into captivity. Desertion rates rose. The Central Powers were depending ever more on German military strength, in both east and west. For Austria the situation worsened still further when on 23 May 1915 Italy joined the war on the side of the British, French and Russian Entente, opening up a southern front. Remarkably, weakened though they had become, the Austro-Hungarians held out well against the Italians. The Germans were meanwhile inflicting serious defeats on the Russians, in February in the Masurian Lake district of East Prussia (with Russian losses of 92,000 men), then in spring and summer in Poland. Galicia was wrested from the Russians in June, most of the remainder of Congress Poland (formerly ruled by Russia) in July and August. Warsaw itself fell to the Germans on 4 August 1915. When the great summer offensive eventually ran out of steam, the Germans had also conquered the Courland (the coastal part of western Latvia) and Lithuania. Between May and September the Tsarist forces suffered astounding losses of over 2 million men, more than 900,000 of them captured. In the autumn the Central Powers also strengthened their position in the Balkans. Serbia, the initial source of the conflict, was finally invaded by German and Austro-Hungarian divisions in early October. Bulgaria, which had committed itself to the war on the side of the Central Powers a month earlier, also sent forces to join the Serbian campaign. By the beginning of November, Serbia was under the control of the Central Powers. A land route for weapons supplies to the Ottoman Empire had been gained. With Russia seriously weakened, the Balkans under control and even the enfeebled Austrians holding the Italians at bay in the south, Germany was now in a substantially better position than had been the case a year earlier to try to force victory in the west. Still, time did not favour the Germans. A push for victory in the west could not wait long. Falkenhayn's plan was to break the French by a massive assault on Verdun, the centre of a big network of fortresses on the Meuse, about 200 kilometres east of Paris. To inflict a devastating defeat on the French at Verdun, he thought, would be a major step towards overall victory in the west. Verdun was under intense siege from February to July 1916, and further heavy fighting continued until December. For the French, the defence of Verdun became the symbol of the fight for France itself. Losses were enormous: over 700,000 men - 377,000 French (162,000 dead) and 337,000 German (143,000 dead). But there was no German breakthrough. For the French, their country was saved. For the Germans, the huge losses had been for nothing. And by mid-July the scene of the greatest carnage had already shifted to the Somme. Here, British and Dominion troops formed the mainstay of the 'big push'. If Verdun was seen later to symbolize the horror of the war for the French, the Somme acquired equally symbolic status in British memory. But there was a difference. Verdun could be remembered as a mighty but necessary patriotic sacrifice to save France. British and Dominion troops at the Somme were not fighting to stave off an attack on their homeland. To many, it was probably unclear just what they were fighting for. The plan of the offensive was largely the work of General (later Field Marshal) Sir Douglas Haig, since December 1915 the British commander-in-chief. The aim of the offensive had, in fact, been altered from its original conception. Initially foreseen as a mainly French-led offensive intended to produce a decisive breakthrough, it had been converted into a chiefly British-led attack to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun. The Germans, it was hoped, would be worn down and significantly weakened. The crucial drive for victory would, however, have to wait. Whatever patriotic rallying-cries and morale-boosting addresses the troops about to go 'over the top' on the Somme heard from their officers, for most of them strategic aims were most likely less important than survival. But tens of thousands would not survive even the first day of the offensive. The Somme came for the British to symbolize the pointlessness of such immense loss of life. After an intensive heavy bombardment lasting over a week, on 1 July 1916, the very first day of the battle, the British and Dominion forces lost 57,470 men, including 19,240 dead and 35,493 wounded. It was the most catastrophic single day in British military history. That it might bring the great breakthrough was swiftly revealed as a costly delusion. When the fighting on the Somme petered out towards the end of November in rain, sleet, snow and mud, British and Dominion troops had gained a strip of about 10 kilometres along a 35-kilometre stretch of the front, and the French about twice as much territory. For that, over a million men had been killed or wounded. British and Dominion casualties had amounted to 419,654 men (127,751 of them killed), while French casualties totalled 204,353 and German some 465,000. In the horrendous scale of its losses, and for so little, the Somme was the most terrible battle on the western front during the First World War. A third huge offensive that year, this time on the eastern front, was named after a Russian general, Aleksey Alekseyevich Brusilov. It was a bold strike that began on 4 June 1916 against Austrian positions on a wide sector of the southern front between the Pripet Marches (straddling southern Belarus and northern Ukraine) and Romania. Brusilov's immediate and massive success owed something to his careful preparations. It owed still more to Austrian ineptitude, abetted by poor morale. Within two days, the Austro-Hungarian front was in a state of collapse. Reinforcements were rushed back from the offensive that had been opened up in northern Italy. German reserves, too, were brought in to head off a total debacle. But by the end of September the Central Powers had been pushed back some 90 kilometres on a broad front. The Austro-Hungarians had by then lost 750,000 men, 380,000 of them captured. German losses were also huge, around 250,000. Yet the Brusilov Offensive, though triumphant for the Russians, had also been at an enormous cost, with losses approaching half a million men during the first ten days, and around a million overall. The jubilation in Russia at the great victory hid the widening cracks behind the facade. Russia, as events were soon to prove, was nearing the end even faster than Austria-Hungary. An immediate outcome of the Brusilov Offensive was to bring Romania into the war on 27 August on the side of the Entente. The Romanians were hoping for big gains at the expense of Hungary after what they took to be the increasingly certain defeat of the Central Powers. Such hopes were rapidly dashed when the Central Powers dispatched an army, under German leadership, which drove back the Romanians from the advances they had made. By the beginning of 1917, the Central Powers had occupied Bucharest and much of Romania, including the strategically important Ploesti oilfields. Successes in the east were, however, no compensation to the German leadership for their failure to make the decisive breakthrough in the west. In August Falkenhayn had paid the price for Verdun, when he was dismissed as Chief of Staff and replaced by the hero of Tannenberg, Field Marshal (as he now was) Hindenburg, a popular military leader in an increasingly unpopular war. His right-hand man, General Ludendorff, now appointed First Quartermaster General, soon turned into the actual driving-force of the new High Command of the Army. This was the beginning of what quickly became tantamount to a military dictatorship, as Hindenburg and Ludendorff intervened ever more directly in government. One indication of this was the aim to end the war through unrestricted submarine attacks on Allied shipping, a strategy imposed over the opposition of the civilian government. The problem of the tightening Allied blockade had remained unresolved. But the German surface fleet had been able to do little about it. For all the money poured into the building of huge battle fleets both by the British and the Germans before the war, the sole major engagement at sea, the battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, had proved inconclusive. The Germans sank more ships - fourteen, compared with eleven that they lost - and had fewer casualties (3,058 to 6,768 on the British side). But the losses crippled the smaller German fleet for months, effectively ruling out its deployment for the rest of the war, whereas the British fleet was capable of continuing the blockade. Attention, therefore, turned increasingly to the prospect of extending the use of U-boats not only to end the blockade, but to bring about a decisive shift in war fortunes. The German naval leadership reckoned that U-boats could sink 600,000 tons of shipping a month - a rate that would force Britain to a state of collapse within five months, before the USA could make any difference to the outcome of the war. But if the U-boat war did not succeed, and America joined the conflict, the prospects for Germany would significantly worsen. The gamble was taken. From 1 February 1917, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare. Allied and neutral shipping in British waters could now be attacked without warning. It was a catastrophic mistake. The US President, Woodrow Wilson, looking to cement American leadership in the post-war world, had up to this point wanted 'peace without victory' and had avoided committing his country to supporting one side or the other in the destructive European conflict. The German decision to unleash the U-boats abruptly terminated such a strategy. Within two days, Wilson broke off diplomatic relations with Germany. The inevitable sinking of American ships by U-boats helped to prompt the US declaration of war on Germany on 6 April 1917 (though it would be spring 1918 before the American Expeditionary Force was in a position to join the fighting on the western front). But only in April and June 1917 did the U-boats sink the required monthly tonnage, which in any event was based upon optimistic notions of British vulnerability. The U-boat war proved a failure. Even worse, Germany had a new and powerful enemy in the Americans. The stalemate on the western front continued during 1917. The Germans, their manpower and resources severely stretched, settled temporarily for defending what they held. In the spring they withdrew to a shorter, more easily defendable new position. They called it the Siegfried-Stellung; for the Allies it was the Hindenburg Line. The shortened line had the additional advantage that it released about twenty German divisions. The Germans were as a result in an improved position to fend off the new Allied offensives that they knew were coming. The first of the offensives, at Arras on 9 April, carried out in driving rain, sleet and snow, led to the usual costly attritional fighting for no further territorial gain. Losses numbered 150,000 Allied and 100,000 German soldiers. Arras was meant to weaken German defences for the major French offensive on the Chemin des Dames, a ridge running along the Aisne valley, east of Soissons and west of Rheims. This offensive was led by the new, assertive Chief of Staff, General Georges Robert Nivelle, appointed in December 1916 to replace General Joseph Joffre. But the Germans had gained intelligence of the forthcoming attack and heavy defences were in place. Nivelle's offensive was a disaster. Five days after it started on 16 April, with 130,000 casualties (29,000 of them dead) and no breakthrough, it was abandoned. On 29 April Nivelle was dismissed and replaced by General Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun. Undeterred by this calamity, which confirmed his poor view of French fighting morale, and not discouraged by his own costly failure on the Somme the previous summer, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig still believed he could achieve a decisive breakthrough with a big offensive near Ypres in the summer of 1917. The aim was a drive through Flanders to eliminate the U-boat bases on the Belgian coast. This goal never came remotely close to realization. Instead, Haig's men became glued into the Flemish mud. The horrors of the third battle of Ypres, which to the British bears the single name 'Passchendaele' (after the village on a slight ridge a few kilometres east of Ypres), rivalled in notoriety those of the Somme. The offensive, beginning on 31 July, was carried out in summer and autumn deluges of rain that, on low-lying ground already churned up by the preceding massive artillery barrage, turned the terrain into frequently waist-deep, glutinous mud swamps. When the offensive was finally called off, soon after the pitiful ruins of the village of Passchendaele were at last taken on 6 November (the village with the poignant name was to be evacuated again and regained by the Germans within five months), the British and Dominion forces had lost 275,000 men (70,000 of them dead), the Germans 217,000. For such losses the Allies had (temporarily) gained a few kilometres. When the final offensive of the year in the west took place, at Cambrai, south-east of Arras, in November - partly an attempt at compensation for the failure at Ypres - it followed a familiar pattern. Early territorial gains by the Allies - 7 kilometres along a 15-kilometre stretch - could not be held. Losses amounted to 45,000 men on the British side, 41,000 on the German. Reserves that might have helped the Allies exploit the early German disarray were lacking, consumed as they had been in the muds of the Ypres salient. The battle of Cambrai did, however, offer a glimpse into the future. Following good air reconnaissance (another new development), British tanks - over 300 of them - for the first time attacked en masse in close formation, followed by infantry and artillery. They had been nearly useless in the morass of Passchendaele. On drier, firmer ground they here inaugurated a new method of attack. For the time being, the lumbering tanks could still be countered by heavy artillery. But their time would come. If there was still military stalemate in the west, what was starting to alter was the sustainability of the conflict. War-weariness was palpable. For all the grumbling among troops, discipline in the British military nevertheless was upheld. Desertion rates and poor morale were worrying for the French government, however, even before some 40,000 French troops mutinied against Nivelle's orders - a mutiny quelled only when Pétain (after Nivelle's dismissal) addressed most of the soldiers' grievances. For all the signs of mounting unrest, no government felt able to seek less than favourable peace terms to justify the horrendous losses suffered. With the war still at an impasse, these were unlikely to be forthcoming. Austria-Hungary was particularly keen to find an exit route. The new Emperor Karl I (successor to Franz Joseph, who had died in November 1916) had made half-hearted overtures towards peace to the American President, Woodrow Wilson, in December. But the German High Command had no intention of giving up Belgium, or other occupied territory. A peace through concessions was out of the question. Victory, whatever the cost, was still the goal. The German army remained ready to fight. Reorganization of armaments production, bringing a big increase in munitions output, enabled it to do so. And, just as deep political fissures within a war-weary Germany emerged and demands for peace grew louder, new hope arose - not in the west, but in the east. In Russia the unrest, swelling for months in the wake of enormous losses at the front and ever worsening, deep privation at home, exploded into revolution in March 1917 (February in the old Russian calendar). The Tsar was toppled. The new Provisional Government that took office in such conditions of crisis felt it had to fight on, despite the evident war-weariness of the troops, to secure a 'peace without defeat'. Its Minister of War (later head of government), Alexander Kerensky, even gave his name to an ill-fated offensive in July across a long front in Galicia and Bukovina. This took place, however, amid continued political upheaval, gathering opposition to the war at home, and failing morale among the troops as revolutionary fervour filtered outwards from Petrograd to soldiers at the front. Following the failure of the Kerensky Offensive, weakened Russian forces were in no position to counter a German attack on Riga in September 1917 (August in the old calendar). The last Russo-German battle of the war ended with Riga under German occupation. By November (October in the old calendar) the Provisional Government, too, had fallen in a second revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. This would soon dramatically change the political constellation of Europe. More immediately, it promised to change war fortunes, for on 20 December 1917, five days after concluding an armistice with the Germans, the new Bolshevik leadership began the painful process of negotiating a peace treaty with Germany. Excerpted from To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 by Ian Kershaw All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
