To Hell and Back- Europe 1914 - 1949
Ian Kershaw - 2015
This is my take on a work by one of my favourite authors and historians, Ian Kershaw. Well researched, well structured, and as always eminently readable, Kershaw is someone who brings the reader in to share a journey of discovery, of fact, and of new and interesting dimensions on periods of modern history which we often think we know intimately, until we accept his navigation to enter the room and pull up a chair. This isn’t a review as such, but rather a brief journey through this book, with my digressions as thoughts float into view like paper boats on a stream. At the end I’ll make a recommendation as to whether, and why, you should buy it if you’re so inclined.
In ten chapters, Ian Kershaw paints a picture of the world, and of human lives, in the first half of the 20th Century. He describes the events which, at each turn, shaped and influenced the following course.
In ‘To Hell and Back’, subtitled "Europe 1914 - 1949", Kershaw examines a group of powerful nations, civilised, cultured, with developed economies, and some with extensive colonial ‘possessions’, enjoying what was considered to be a golden age of the latter years of the 19th century and the early ones of the 20th. He recounts how they manoeuvred themselves and one another into a cats-cradle of alliances, enmities and mutual suspicion, so that the whole thing resembled a huge wooden structure which people admired in awe, but in reality was only awaiting a spark to turn it into a bonfire of human souls. And how such a spark obliged, whilst most of the people were still inside. He chooses 1949 as the finishing point for this volume, so he can examine how the consequences of the years leading up to the end of the Second World War shaped the future course of European, and consequently, world, history. This seems to me to be very sensible.
I’ve never thought our predilection to bundle history up into such neat little packets is very sophisticated; history doesn’t operate in a vacuum. World War One didn’t suddenly began one day in August 1914 without any hint of trouble being evident in July. World War Two didn’t happen in September 1939 bearing no relation to that previous bout of fisticuffs. In 1945, peace didn’t occur so quickly that the whole world laid down it’s rivalries, territorial ambitions, nationalistic fervour along with it’s weapons and dashed off to lie on the beach.
Likewise, decades, in a cultural sense, don’t start in a year ending in a zero, and end tidily in the next year with a nine on its tail. The oft-quoted ‘sixties’ didn’t, in reality, start in 1960, nor did it end in 1969. The years 1960 to, perhaps, late 1962, were really a continuation, in many ways, of the ‘1950’s’; staid, stolid, marked by austerity, and under the management of white, middle-aged or elderly men, whose views and outlook were marked by having lived through at least one if not two global wars. They looked understandably askance as the cultural landscape became first illuminated, then dominated, by a number of milestones which were anathema to their ways of thinking. Long hair, teenagers, pop music, fashion and photography, radical television and movie output, all these and more were seen for the first time - and for the first time, this next generation showed no predilection whatsoever to conform to the ways of the previous ones, as generations had previously done. And there were other assaults on the established order too - women and black people, for heaven’s sake. Little wonder those of a different time demanded to know if this was what they fought a war for!
The sixties didn’t, in a cultural sense, end conveniently in 1969. As the decade swung, and sang, and danced, and got high, and became a battleground between the generations, the world wondered what it was coming to. In many ways it came to a violent stop, with the Manson ‘family’ murders, and Altamont, in 1969; but in others, it dragged on messily into the seventies with Vietnam; or until Watergate; some fights for recognition which began in, or helped shape, the decade would continue until the present day, such as gay rights, equality of women, civil rights, or the stand against racism and bigotry.
Anyway, back to Ian Kershaw. He sets his narrative in the first half of the 20th Century, which was as he says, ‘dominated by war’. He paints a picture of the later years of the 1800’s, which was seen then and has been since as a period of calm and reason, of cultured ease and intelligent political discourse. The ‘peace’ which existed was, of course, only relative insofar as there weren’t any big wars, such as had been experienced in Europe when Napoleon Bonaparte was the big shot in France, or when the United States weren’t. (United, that is.) But for many Jews, Africans, Armenians, and others under the subjugation of the so-called Great Powers, this ‘Golden Age’ turned out to be little more than a time of misery and horror. Yet it was popularly styled, depending on where you lived, as a ‘Gilded Age’, (USA), ‘La Belle Époque’, (France), or the ‘Wilhelmina Era, (Germany). And he gives a flavour of how establishment figures, and academics, breathed the rarified air of privilege when he recounts how the economist J. Maynard Keynes wrote after WW1 of how ‘the inhabitant of London... (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.’ Yeah, because that’s exactly how my great-grandad, living in the Durham coalfield, always did his shopping, when he need some more Persian rugs, or Chinese silks, or when he ran short of Darjeeling. Still, it lets us see how the ordinary workers weren’t so much patronised as completely ignored. Whoops, my socialism’s showing.
In Chapter 1 - On The Brink, Kershaw describes how the First World War was preceded by economic stability amongst the trading nations, with the recognition of the Gold Standard helping bring confidence that this stability and its attendant growth would continue without interruption. The 1900 World Fair in Paris displayed the brilliant minds and deft ingenuity of the late Victorian era. He describes the relative peace in Europe since the demise of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815, following his comeback tour during the ‘Hundred Days’, although little is made of the spat between the French and the Prussians in 1870-71. He covers the organising of the working class after 1900, and I learnt that by 1914, there were over 4 million Trade Union members in Britain.
Reading that statistic alone prompted me to consider how this class mobilisation was to change the social and political landscape throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st. It helped to bring about a growing awareness amongst working people of why their lives were shaped as they were; about why they should challenge the established order, and the means available to do so. It also frightened the living daylights out of the very same ‘retired generals and admirals’, and the ‘spinster sitting in a deck chair picking up stitches’ who 1938 would later encounter in Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’. So much so, in fact, that the organised labour movement would be seen in times of national stress as a serious threat to security, and little distinction would be made between those radical elements who aligned themselves with Marxist philosophy, or after 1917 drew inspiration and confidence from Bolshevism, and the majority of workers who shunned violent revolution and strove only for better conditions, better pay, and an end to being at the whim of their often harsh paymasters.
Yet already, despite the apparent peaceful, cultured and untroubled path of these developed nations, there were unpleasant seeds which would later grow and bear very unpleasant fruit. Even an ‘intellectual’ such as D.H.Lawrence dreamt of a ‘lethal chamber as big as Crystal Palace’ into which he would lead the sick and the maimed, while a band gently played the Hallelujah Chorus, and they would ‘smile him a weary thanks’! Mind you, this fruitcake was opposed to the enfranchisement of the working class, disparaged the French Revolution, and has been described as a racist and a sadist. Even Bertrand Russell, who knew him, said he was a ‘proto-German fascist.’ I’d like to have stuffed Lawrence into a lethal chamber and seen what type of thanks he offered me! Funny how people who propose eugenics and genocide for others are never in a position where it might happen to them...
Pogroms in the early part of the this Century preceded it’s later genocide, developed into a machine by the Nazis. In October 1905 alone, 3,000 Jews were murdered in Russia, Tsarist forces killed a further 15,000 opponents. In the Ottoman Empire, once powerful but now in decline, 80,000 Armenians were murdered between 1894 and 1896 by Turkish forces; in 1909 a further 20,000 were similarly dispatched. Take a moment to ponder these figures, which were not unusual. Some ‘Golden Age’.
And the slaughter continued. By the turn of the Century, four-fifths of the world was controlled by Great Britain, France and Russia alone. Imperialist rule was ruthlessly enforced - during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, foreign soldiers, including those from Germany, the USA and Japan, moved to assert Western control, and an estimated 100,000 chinese were slaughtered. In the Belgian Congo, King Leopold was so determined to ensure that nothing stood in the way of Belgian hegemony over the lucrative rubber trade, that they killed 10 million - yes, 10 million men, women and children between 1885 and 1908. Britain’s record isn’t one of untarnished honour, either. During the Boer War of 1899 to 1902, opposition from Boer farmers was suppressed using ‘scorched earth’ tactics, and they held 28,000 Boer prisoners in what they called ‘Concentration Camps’, which were little more than squalid, diseased and overcrowded hell-holes; a quarter of prisoners died as a result. Now, where have we heard that term before? Kershaw gives a particularly shocking statistic concerning the Herero and Nama peoples of what was then South-West Africa, now Namibia. Between 1904 and 1907, 65,000 of the indigenous population perished - 80% of the total. But what makes this particularly cruel is the manner and reason. Because they had resisted colonial rule by Germany, the Kaiser’s troops drove them into the desert and forced them to die of hunger and thirst. Germany then took a page straight out of the British Imperial playbook, and imprisoned many more in the aforementioned ‘concentration camps’, where they were worked to death. The Germans were to raise the practice to new levels in due course, but Britain had again led the world...
The book captures changes in attitude as, throughout late summer of 1914, war became closer. Many on the left, in Britain and France especially, came to set aside their opposition - the belligerence of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians made any conflict seem defensive in nature. The popular mood of the masses also moved towards patriotic fervour, although not necessarily at the speed which jingoistic elements in the media would have liked. As the German High Command dusted off the Von Schlieffen Plan, it’s striking how differing attitudes and motivations in various countries all swayed towards the same result- little opposition to a war, if not downright support. In Britain, war was seen as necessary to prevent the Germans from dominating the continent and threatening their martial strength - amongst all the belligerents, Britain had by far the smallest army, albeit a professional, well-equipped and very well trained one, and relied on the powerful Royal Navy for dominance. Although we did have enormous resources of manpower in the colonies and dominions to call upon. But Germany’s ambition to match Britain’s Imperial strength was realised, and British hackles were raised by fears that Germany, already with a huge army, would soon develop naval power to rival British maritime supremacy.
In Germany, fear and ambition were the drivers. The desire to challenge British hegemony across the world, and to be seen as an equal in imperial strength, with its concordant economic benefits, was irresistible to a nation where the military caste was essentially rooted in Prussian history. And the threat to their position from Russia, another nation with huge resources, although one which was only now trying to modernise and rearm its forces, was uppermost in German minds.
The French don’t seem to have had any particular global or continental ambitions, but the memory of the Prussian conflict of 1870 was still fresh in their minds, and like Britain, they recognised that fulfilment of German ambitions would be to their cost, so they were quite ready to halt the march of what was seen as Prussian expansionism.
The Austro-Hungarians never wanted to spark a major conflict, but initially desired little more that to assert themselves over their smaller neighbours, and to gain revenge for the murder of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists, who had been supported and coerced by many in positions of power in Serbia. But as was the way with this increasingly cumbersome and disparate Empire, they dithered, and delayed. A sharp military response to the assassination may well have been accepted by everyone except Russia, without leading to a wider war; after all, Archduke Ferdinand was popular, modern for his day, and recognised as someone who wanted to give more freedoms to minorities with the empire. But their dilatory response allowed the situation to fester for weeks, while each of the big boys considered how they could turn the situation to their own advantage. And all the time, the Germans were making the Austrians believe that whatever happened, with them on side, what could go wrong? The Italians saw a war as giving them, too, a bigger plate at the dinner table, even though the evidence was scant. As for the Turks, whose empire stretched across much of the Middle East, it was a way to bolster their declining power, while resisting the increasing threat from Russia.
Russia. They were still smarting from the beating they took at the hands of the Japanese in 1906, when the forces of plucky little Nippon gave the mighty Russian Bear a bloody nose. That was an opportunity for stereotypes and metaphor, eh? Nonetheless, with a country which was lagging behind others in terms of industrial strength, and a disparate population which in many parts was still backward and feudal, the Tsarists saw a chance to stake Russia’s claim amongst nations, while muscling their way ahead of their biggest threats, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, who still held much of the lands which Russia saw as rightfully its own.
And then there was the Triple Entente...
But there was one belief which all these countries shared - that the war would be short. The Germans, as was their habit, favoured the knockout blow. After all, when General Moltke took down the file marked ‘Von Schlieffen Plan’, it revealed exactly that - a war on two fronts being inevitable, the sensible thing to do was to strike at France and put them out of the game, then turn its attention to the more cumbersome Russians. And with the Turks on their side, not to mention Austro-Hungary (who turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help), the Russians should be too difficult. That’s why when it finally came, all seemed to agree that it would be over in a few months, so it wasn’t to be avoided at all costs. It began in August 1914. By November 1914 millions of men on the western front were busy digging trenches and pledging about in mud. So much for a short war...
Kershaw makes an interesting point about mobilisation, although he doesn’t elaborate. Mobilisation was carried out along railway timetables - the Germans had 11,000 trains, the French 7,000. And between them, the Austrians, Germans and Russians had 2.5 million horses. So little had changed from the days of Napoleon. It’s striking to learn that in 1914, none of the combatants were issued with steel helmets. British and French troops didn’t get them until 1915; the Germans until 1916. Or gas masks, for that matter. Kershaw makes the excellent remark, ‘The armies that went to war in1914 were nineteenth-century armies. They were about to fight a twentieth-century war.’ It’s a chilling point.
In Chapter 2 - The Great Disaster, Kershaw opens with examples of how certain authors both foretold, then later reflected on, the devastating slaughter visited on the world in 1914. He discusses how men went up against machines which were designed solely for the purpose of delivering large scale death and destruction. He accurately describes war as ‘the driver of technological change’, bringing new weapons - poison gas, tanks, submarines and bombing from the air.
It really isn’t surprising that man’s appetite for war is always accompanied by this capacity for invention. He either invents new weapons to give him primacy over his enemy (poison gas), or he takes an existing one, and mechanises it to a new level of horror (machine guns). Sometimes, he sees in an existing invention, developed for peaceful means, such as the aeroplane or the dirigible, the opportunity to kill, and thinks, oh, good, we can use that to drop exploding stuff on people. Mankind seems to constantly harbour the little-supported theory that if one side gets a weapon before the other side, they can use it to kill the others, or at least subjugate them before they can develop the same weapon. Good examples are tanks and atom bombs. When the British introduced three Mark 1’s to battle in September 1916, the Germans were reported to have run away. I would have too. But the next year, the French had them, and although the Germans came late to the party in 1918, they certainly learnt the lesson by 1940...
As for the atomic bomb, the Japanese soon surrendered in 1945 after the Americans dropped 40 kilotonnes on them at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Duh. But ever since the Germans had worked on nuclear fission in 1938, it wasn’t just the Yanks who were interested - the Soviets were stroking their goatees and raising a communist eyebrow, too. By 1949, they had an atomic weapon, and then the arms race went nuclear, so to speak.
In describing the First War itself, Kershaw gets the detail just right, giving enough to illuminate the slaughter, the suffering, the loss and huge gulf between expectations and reality, without letting his narrative be bogged down in detail. He does, however, use statistics to paint a clear picture of how quickly the conflict sank into a series of battles costly in human terms, and wholly inconclusive in strategic ones. The belief in a short and victorious war was soon dispelled.
The war began in August 1914; by the end of November total casualties (dead, wounded or captured) already reached 450,000. The British lost 90,000, more than they’d initially recruited. And the butcher’s bill kept on growing. Austro-Hungarian casualties were half a million in five months; Germany’s 800,000 by the end of 1914 alone. In nine months, Russian casualties had become 2 million men. And none of that included non-combatants. The second chapter continues to illuminate the course of the war. Austrian failures against Serbia; Turkish failure against the Russians and success against the British. British losses on the Somme; British failure and embarrassment in Churchill’s ill advised Dardanelles effort - another 250,000 casualties. Turkish atrocities against the Armenians cost one million lives. Stalemate on the Western Front. The horrific and disgusting charnel house on the Somme drove the price up - 20,000 British dead on the first day alone. By the end of November, both sides had lost a million men between them. All for the achievement of a twenty kilometre advance. More enormous loss at Verdun, where the Germans tried, and failed, to deliver a knockout to the French. An ironic footnote to Verdun - the French hero was General Phillippe Pétain, who would later head the Vichy regime which controlled part of France in collaboration with the Nazis.
This unimaginable toll of human life is so indicative of how the ‘leaders’, politicians, military commanders and monarchies viewed the value of life before and during the First World War. A nation’s people were to be courted for votes, squeezed for taxes, and fed propaganda for popular support; and when war came, time and again we see that they were also poured into the war machine for their blood and sacrifice. Human life is so often undervalued by those whose own lives are safe from threat, or insulated by wealth.
In my next post on this, I’ll discuss the course of the war to its end; how revolution came to one belligerent power, almost came to another, and left all of them except, perhaps, one, immeasurably damaged as they tottered to an unsatisfactory peace, and an uncertain future.
This is my take on a work by one of my favourite authors and historians, Ian Kershaw. Well researched, well structured, and as always eminently readable, Kershaw is someone who brings the reader in to share a journey of discovery, of fact, and of new and interesting dimensions on periods of modern history which we often think we know intimately, until we accept his navigation to enter the room and pull up a chair. This isn’t a review as such, but rather a brief journey through this book, with my digressions as thoughts float into view like paper boats on a stream. At the end I’ll make a recommendation as to whether, and why, you should buy it if you’re so inclined.
In ten chapters, Ian Kershaw paints a picture of the world, and of human lives, in the first half of the 20th Century. He describes the events which, at each turn, shaped and influenced the following course.
In ‘To Hell and Back’, subtitled "Europe 1914 - 1949", Kershaw examines a group of powerful nations, civilised, cultured, with developed economies, and some with extensive colonial ‘possessions’, enjoying what was considered to be a golden age of the latter years of the 19th century and the early ones of the 20th. He recounts how they manoeuvred themselves and one another into a cats-cradle of alliances, enmities and mutual suspicion, so that the whole thing resembled a huge wooden structure which people admired in awe, but in reality was only awaiting a spark to turn it into a bonfire of human souls. And how such a spark obliged, whilst most of the people were still inside. He chooses 1949 as the finishing point for this volume, so he can examine how the consequences of the years leading up to the end of the Second World War shaped the future course of European, and consequently, world, history. This seems to me to be very sensible.
I’ve never thought our predilection to bundle history up into such neat little packets is very sophisticated; history doesn’t operate in a vacuum. World War One didn’t suddenly began one day in August 1914 without any hint of trouble being evident in July. World War Two didn’t happen in September 1939 bearing no relation to that previous bout of fisticuffs. In 1945, peace didn’t occur so quickly that the whole world laid down it’s rivalries, territorial ambitions, nationalistic fervour along with it’s weapons and dashed off to lie on the beach.
Likewise, decades, in a cultural sense, don’t start in a year ending in a zero, and end tidily in the next year with a nine on its tail. The oft-quoted ‘sixties’ didn’t, in reality, start in 1960, nor did it end in 1969. The years 1960 to, perhaps, late 1962, were really a continuation, in many ways, of the ‘1950’s’; staid, stolid, marked by austerity, and under the management of white, middle-aged or elderly men, whose views and outlook were marked by having lived through at least one if not two global wars. They looked understandably askance as the cultural landscape became first illuminated, then dominated, by a number of milestones which were anathema to their ways of thinking. Long hair, teenagers, pop music, fashion and photography, radical television and movie output, all these and more were seen for the first time - and for the first time, this next generation showed no predilection whatsoever to conform to the ways of the previous ones, as generations had previously done. And there were other assaults on the established order too - women and black people, for heaven’s sake. Little wonder those of a different time demanded to know if this was what they fought a war for!
The sixties didn’t, in a cultural sense, end conveniently in 1969. As the decade swung, and sang, and danced, and got high, and became a battleground between the generations, the world wondered what it was coming to. In many ways it came to a violent stop, with the Manson ‘family’ murders, and Altamont, in 1969; but in others, it dragged on messily into the seventies with Vietnam; or until Watergate; some fights for recognition which began in, or helped shape, the decade would continue until the present day, such as gay rights, equality of women, civil rights, or the stand against racism and bigotry.
Anyway, back to Ian Kershaw. He sets his narrative in the first half of the 20th Century, which was as he says, ‘dominated by war’. He paints a picture of the later years of the 1800’s, which was seen then and has been since as a period of calm and reason, of cultured ease and intelligent political discourse. The ‘peace’ which existed was, of course, only relative insofar as there weren’t any big wars, such as had been experienced in Europe when Napoleon Bonaparte was the big shot in France, or when the United States weren’t. (United, that is.) But for many Jews, Africans, Armenians, and others under the subjugation of the so-called Great Powers, this ‘Golden Age’ turned out to be little more than a time of misery and horror. Yet it was popularly styled, depending on where you lived, as a ‘Gilded Age’, (USA), ‘La Belle Époque’, (France), or the ‘Wilhelmina Era, (Germany). And he gives a flavour of how establishment figures, and academics, breathed the rarified air of privilege when he recounts how the economist J. Maynard Keynes wrote after WW1 of how ‘the inhabitant of London... (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.’ Yeah, because that’s exactly how my great-grandad, living in the Durham coalfield, always did his shopping, when he need some more Persian rugs, or Chinese silks, or when he ran short of Darjeeling. Still, it lets us see how the ordinary workers weren’t so much patronised as completely ignored. Whoops, my socialism’s showing.
In Chapter 1 - On The Brink, Kershaw describes how the First World War was preceded by economic stability amongst the trading nations, with the recognition of the Gold Standard helping bring confidence that this stability and its attendant growth would continue without interruption. The 1900 World Fair in Paris displayed the brilliant minds and deft ingenuity of the late Victorian era. He describes the relative peace in Europe since the demise of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815, following his comeback tour during the ‘Hundred Days’, although little is made of the spat between the French and the Prussians in 1870-71. He covers the organising of the working class after 1900, and I learnt that by 1914, there were over 4 million Trade Union members in Britain.
Reading that statistic alone prompted me to consider how this class mobilisation was to change the social and political landscape throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st. It helped to bring about a growing awareness amongst working people of why their lives were shaped as they were; about why they should challenge the established order, and the means available to do so. It also frightened the living daylights out of the very same ‘retired generals and admirals’, and the ‘spinster sitting in a deck chair picking up stitches’ who 1938 would later encounter in Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’. So much so, in fact, that the organised labour movement would be seen in times of national stress as a serious threat to security, and little distinction would be made between those radical elements who aligned themselves with Marxist philosophy, or after 1917 drew inspiration and confidence from Bolshevism, and the majority of workers who shunned violent revolution and strove only for better conditions, better pay, and an end to being at the whim of their often harsh paymasters.
Yet already, despite the apparent peaceful, cultured and untroubled path of these developed nations, there were unpleasant seeds which would later grow and bear very unpleasant fruit. Even an ‘intellectual’ such as D.H.Lawrence dreamt of a ‘lethal chamber as big as Crystal Palace’ into which he would lead the sick and the maimed, while a band gently played the Hallelujah Chorus, and they would ‘smile him a weary thanks’! Mind you, this fruitcake was opposed to the enfranchisement of the working class, disparaged the French Revolution, and has been described as a racist and a sadist. Even Bertrand Russell, who knew him, said he was a ‘proto-German fascist.’ I’d like to have stuffed Lawrence into a lethal chamber and seen what type of thanks he offered me! Funny how people who propose eugenics and genocide for others are never in a position where it might happen to them...
Pogroms in the early part of the this Century preceded it’s later genocide, developed into a machine by the Nazis. In October 1905 alone, 3,000 Jews were murdered in Russia, Tsarist forces killed a further 15,000 opponents. In the Ottoman Empire, once powerful but now in decline, 80,000 Armenians were murdered between 1894 and 1896 by Turkish forces; in 1909 a further 20,000 were similarly dispatched. Take a moment to ponder these figures, which were not unusual. Some ‘Golden Age’.
And the slaughter continued. By the turn of the Century, four-fifths of the world was controlled by Great Britain, France and Russia alone. Imperialist rule was ruthlessly enforced - during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, foreign soldiers, including those from Germany, the USA and Japan, moved to assert Western control, and an estimated 100,000 chinese were slaughtered. In the Belgian Congo, King Leopold was so determined to ensure that nothing stood in the way of Belgian hegemony over the lucrative rubber trade, that they killed 10 million - yes, 10 million men, women and children between 1885 and 1908. Britain’s record isn’t one of untarnished honour, either. During the Boer War of 1899 to 1902, opposition from Boer farmers was suppressed using ‘scorched earth’ tactics, and they held 28,000 Boer prisoners in what they called ‘Concentration Camps’, which were little more than squalid, diseased and overcrowded hell-holes; a quarter of prisoners died as a result. Now, where have we heard that term before? Kershaw gives a particularly shocking statistic concerning the Herero and Nama peoples of what was then South-West Africa, now Namibia. Between 1904 and 1907, 65,000 of the indigenous population perished - 80% of the total. But what makes this particularly cruel is the manner and reason. Because they had resisted colonial rule by Germany, the Kaiser’s troops drove them into the desert and forced them to die of hunger and thirst. Germany then took a page straight out of the British Imperial playbook, and imprisoned many more in the aforementioned ‘concentration camps’, where they were worked to death. The Germans were to raise the practice to new levels in due course, but Britain had again led the world...
The book captures changes in attitude as, throughout late summer of 1914, war became closer. Many on the left, in Britain and France especially, came to set aside their opposition - the belligerence of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians made any conflict seem defensive in nature. The popular mood of the masses also moved towards patriotic fervour, although not necessarily at the speed which jingoistic elements in the media would have liked. As the German High Command dusted off the Von Schlieffen Plan, it’s striking how differing attitudes and motivations in various countries all swayed towards the same result- little opposition to a war, if not downright support. In Britain, war was seen as necessary to prevent the Germans from dominating the continent and threatening their martial strength - amongst all the belligerents, Britain had by far the smallest army, albeit a professional, well-equipped and very well trained one, and relied on the powerful Royal Navy for dominance. Although we did have enormous resources of manpower in the colonies and dominions to call upon. But Germany’s ambition to match Britain’s Imperial strength was realised, and British hackles were raised by fears that Germany, already with a huge army, would soon develop naval power to rival British maritime supremacy.
In Germany, fear and ambition were the drivers. The desire to challenge British hegemony across the world, and to be seen as an equal in imperial strength, with its concordant economic benefits, was irresistible to a nation where the military caste was essentially rooted in Prussian history. And the threat to their position from Russia, another nation with huge resources, although one which was only now trying to modernise and rearm its forces, was uppermost in German minds.
The French don’t seem to have had any particular global or continental ambitions, but the memory of the Prussian conflict of 1870 was still fresh in their minds, and like Britain, they recognised that fulfilment of German ambitions would be to their cost, so they were quite ready to halt the march of what was seen as Prussian expansionism.
The Austro-Hungarians never wanted to spark a major conflict, but initially desired little more that to assert themselves over their smaller neighbours, and to gain revenge for the murder of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo by Serbian nationalists, who had been supported and coerced by many in positions of power in Serbia. But as was the way with this increasingly cumbersome and disparate Empire, they dithered, and delayed. A sharp military response to the assassination may well have been accepted by everyone except Russia, without leading to a wider war; after all, Archduke Ferdinand was popular, modern for his day, and recognised as someone who wanted to give more freedoms to minorities with the empire. But their dilatory response allowed the situation to fester for weeks, while each of the big boys considered how they could turn the situation to their own advantage. And all the time, the Germans were making the Austrians believe that whatever happened, with them on side, what could go wrong? The Italians saw a war as giving them, too, a bigger plate at the dinner table, even though the evidence was scant. As for the Turks, whose empire stretched across much of the Middle East, it was a way to bolster their declining power, while resisting the increasing threat from Russia.
Russia. They were still smarting from the beating they took at the hands of the Japanese in 1906, when the forces of plucky little Nippon gave the mighty Russian Bear a bloody nose. That was an opportunity for stereotypes and metaphor, eh? Nonetheless, with a country which was lagging behind others in terms of industrial strength, and a disparate population which in many parts was still backward and feudal, the Tsarists saw a chance to stake Russia’s claim amongst nations, while muscling their way ahead of their biggest threats, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, who still held much of the lands which Russia saw as rightfully its own.
And then there was the Triple Entente...
But there was one belief which all these countries shared - that the war would be short. The Germans, as was their habit, favoured the knockout blow. After all, when General Moltke took down the file marked ‘Von Schlieffen Plan’, it revealed exactly that - a war on two fronts being inevitable, the sensible thing to do was to strike at France and put them out of the game, then turn its attention to the more cumbersome Russians. And with the Turks on their side, not to mention Austro-Hungary (who turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help), the Russians should be too difficult. That’s why when it finally came, all seemed to agree that it would be over in a few months, so it wasn’t to be avoided at all costs. It began in August 1914. By November 1914 millions of men on the western front were busy digging trenches and pledging about in mud. So much for a short war...
Kershaw makes an interesting point about mobilisation, although he doesn’t elaborate. Mobilisation was carried out along railway timetables - the Germans had 11,000 trains, the French 7,000. And between them, the Austrians, Germans and Russians had 2.5 million horses. So little had changed from the days of Napoleon. It’s striking to learn that in 1914, none of the combatants were issued with steel helmets. British and French troops didn’t get them until 1915; the Germans until 1916. Or gas masks, for that matter. Kershaw makes the excellent remark, ‘The armies that went to war in1914 were nineteenth-century armies. They were about to fight a twentieth-century war.’ It’s a chilling point.
In Chapter 2 - The Great Disaster, Kershaw opens with examples of how certain authors both foretold, then later reflected on, the devastating slaughter visited on the world in 1914. He discusses how men went up against machines which were designed solely for the purpose of delivering large scale death and destruction. He accurately describes war as ‘the driver of technological change’, bringing new weapons - poison gas, tanks, submarines and bombing from the air.
It really isn’t surprising that man’s appetite for war is always accompanied by this capacity for invention. He either invents new weapons to give him primacy over his enemy (poison gas), or he takes an existing one, and mechanises it to a new level of horror (machine guns). Sometimes, he sees in an existing invention, developed for peaceful means, such as the aeroplane or the dirigible, the opportunity to kill, and thinks, oh, good, we can use that to drop exploding stuff on people. Mankind seems to constantly harbour the little-supported theory that if one side gets a weapon before the other side, they can use it to kill the others, or at least subjugate them before they can develop the same weapon. Good examples are tanks and atom bombs. When the British introduced three Mark 1’s to battle in September 1916, the Germans were reported to have run away. I would have too. But the next year, the French had them, and although the Germans came late to the party in 1918, they certainly learnt the lesson by 1940...
As for the atomic bomb, the Japanese soon surrendered in 1945 after the Americans dropped 40 kilotonnes on them at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Duh. But ever since the Germans had worked on nuclear fission in 1938, it wasn’t just the Yanks who were interested - the Soviets were stroking their goatees and raising a communist eyebrow, too. By 1949, they had an atomic weapon, and then the arms race went nuclear, so to speak.
In describing the First War itself, Kershaw gets the detail just right, giving enough to illuminate the slaughter, the suffering, the loss and huge gulf between expectations and reality, without letting his narrative be bogged down in detail. He does, however, use statistics to paint a clear picture of how quickly the conflict sank into a series of battles costly in human terms, and wholly inconclusive in strategic ones. The belief in a short and victorious war was soon dispelled.
The war began in August 1914; by the end of November total casualties (dead, wounded or captured) already reached 450,000. The British lost 90,000, more than they’d initially recruited. And the butcher’s bill kept on growing. Austro-Hungarian casualties were half a million in five months; Germany’s 800,000 by the end of 1914 alone. In nine months, Russian casualties had become 2 million men. And none of that included non-combatants. The second chapter continues to illuminate the course of the war. Austrian failures against Serbia; Turkish failure against the Russians and success against the British. British losses on the Somme; British failure and embarrassment in Churchill’s ill advised Dardanelles effort - another 250,000 casualties. Turkish atrocities against the Armenians cost one million lives. Stalemate on the Western Front. The horrific and disgusting charnel house on the Somme drove the price up - 20,000 British dead on the first day alone. By the end of November, both sides had lost a million men between them. All for the achievement of a twenty kilometre advance. More enormous loss at Verdun, where the Germans tried, and failed, to deliver a knockout to the French. An ironic footnote to Verdun - the French hero was General Phillippe Pétain, who would later head the Vichy regime which controlled part of France in collaboration with the Nazis.
This unimaginable toll of human life is so indicative of how the ‘leaders’, politicians, military commanders and monarchies viewed the value of life before and during the First World War. A nation’s people were to be courted for votes, squeezed for taxes, and fed propaganda for popular support; and when war came, time and again we see that they were also poured into the war machine for their blood and sacrifice. Human life is so often undervalued by those whose own lives are safe from threat, or insulated by wealth.
In my next post on this, I’ll discuss the course of the war to its end; how revolution came to one belligerent power, almost came to another, and left all of them except, perhaps, one, immeasurably damaged as they tottered to an unsatisfactory peace, and an uncertain future.
Comments