A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (53 page)

The time when imperialism’s bloody adventures in the colonies could stabilise the system at its centre was passing. But before anyone had a chance to see where this would lead, blood was to be shed on an unprecedented scale across Europe.

The road to war

The fact that imperialism meant wars between colonial powers as well as the enslavement of colonised peoples had been shown as early as 1904, when Russia’s drive east towards the Pacific led it into direct conflict, in northern China, with Japan’s drive west through Korea. Its defeat in the war which followed helped precipitate the 1905 Revolution. Twice it seemed as if a similar clash of interests in Morocco might lead to war between France and Germany, in 1906 and 1911.

But the truly dangerous area was south east Europe, the Balkans, where each of the Great Powers regarded particular local states as its clients. There were wars between these states in 1912 and 1913. First Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and Bulgaria fell upon the remaining Turkish territories of Macedonia and Thrace, leaving Turkey with only Istanbul and a narrow strip of eastern Thrace. Then Greece, Serbia and Romania, encouraged by the Great Powers, fell upon Bulgaria. The wars were marked by atrocities on all sides. Sections of the urban middle classes wanted to create and expand ‘modern’ linguistically uniform national states. But the rural populations were almost everywhere mixtures of different ethnic groups speaking different dialects and languages. The only way to carve out secure ‘ethnically pure’ national states was through wars involving the expulsion and even extermination of civilians who did not fit the necessary criteria. The first war ended in the Treaty of London, and the second in the Treaty of Bucharest. But these did nothing to remove the underlying pressures leading to war, and the same pressures existed in much of Austro-Hungarian Eastern Europe as in the former Ottoman areas. The whole region was a gigantic explosive cocktail.

Just how explosive was shown in July 1914, when the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand paid an official visit to Sarajevo, the capital of the Austrian-run province of Bosnia. He was assassinated by a nationalist who stood for driving out the Austrians and integrating the province into neighbouring Serbia.

What happened next is well known: the Austrian government declared war on Serbia; the Russian government feared a challenge to its own position and declared war on Austria; Germany identified its interests with Austria’s and moved against Russia; France felt it had to prevent Germany defeating Russia and becoming the dominant European power; Britain threw its weight behind France and went to war against Germany, using the movement of German troops through Belgium as an excuse. Within a week, 44 years of peace in Western Europe—the longest period anyone could recall—had given way to a war involving all the major states.

Wars, like revolutions, often seem to be triggered by the most minor of events. This leads people to see them as accidental, a result of a random chain of misjudgements and misunderstandings. But, in fact, the minor events are significant because they come to symbolise the balance between great social or political forces. A sparkplug is one of the cheapest components in a motor car, and cannot move anything by itself. But it can ignite the explosive force of petrol vapour in the engine. In the same way, an assassination or a tax rise can be of little importance in itself, but can bring about clashes between states or great social forces.

Behind the long chain of diplomatic activity in the summer of 1914 lay a very simple fact. The rival imperialisms which had emerged as each capitalism tried to solve its own problems by expanding across state boundaries now collided right across the world. Economic competition had turned into competition for territories, and the outcome depended on armed might. No state could afford to back down once the chain of confrontations had been set off by the Sarajevo assassination, because no state could risk a weakening of its global strength. The same imperialism which had stimulated economic growth and a belief in the inevitability of progress was now to tear the heart of Europe apart.

4 August 1914

Almost everyone involved in the war thought it would be short. The German crown prince spoke of a ‘bright and jolly war’. He expected a repetition of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when the French army was defeated within weeks. French soldiers wrote ‘à Berlin’ on the railway carriages taking them to the front. ‘It will all be over by Christmas’ was the common British refrain.

At first the war was popular. Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin witnessed ‘the mad delirium…patriotic street demonstrations…singing throngs, coffee shops with their patriotic songs…violent mobs ready to whip themselves into delirious frenzy over every wild rumour…trains filled with reservists…pull out amid the joyous cries of enthusiastic maidens’.
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Trotsky wrote, ‘The patriotic enthusiasm of the masses in Austria-Hungary seemed especially surprising…I strode along the main streets of the familiar Vienna and watched a most amazing crowd fill the fashionable Ring…porters, laundresses, shoe-makers, apprentices and youngsters from the suburbs’.
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In London ‘an immense and tremendously enthusiastic crowd’ gathered outside Buckingham Palace’ on 4 August.
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Victor Serge, in a French prison, described how ‘passionate singing of the “Marseillaise”, from crowds seeing troops off to the train, drifted across even to our jail. We could hear shouts of “To Berlin! To Berlin!’
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Even in St Petersburg the strikes and barricades of only a few days earlier seemed forgotten. The British ambassador Buchanan later spoke of ‘those wonderful early August days’ when ‘Russia seemed to have been completely transformed’.
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The popularity of the war was not necessarily as deeply engrained among the mass of people as the enthusiastic demonstrations and singing of patriotic songs suggested. Historian David Blackbourn writes of Germany, ‘The patriotic demonstrations of late July involved relatively small groups, with students and young salesmen prominent. Working class areas like the Ruhr were quiet…Older observers noted a contrast with the enthusiasm of 1870’.
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Shlyapnikov, a revolutionary worker in St Petersburg, contrasted the enthusiasm for the war among the middle and upper classes with the more subdued mood in the factories:

Ralph Fox told how, as a young worker in London, it was possible to organise weekly anti-war meetings in Finsbury Park.
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Trotsky explained the mood more as a reaction to people’s normal humdrum lives than any deep-seated nationalism:

Different social classes are never fully segregated from one another. The mood of those at the top influences those just below them, and the mood of those in the middle influences those at the bottom. The determination of Europe’s ruling classes to go to war with one another was transmitted in a thousand ways to the middle classes and sections of the working class—through patriotic speeches and newspaper stories about ‘enemy atrocities’, through marching bands and popular songs, and through declarations by novelists, poets and philosophers. The German historian Meinecke described the outbreak of the war as filling him with ‘the profoundest joy’. The radical French novelist Anatole France recalled (with a sense of shame) making ‘little speeches to the soldiers’. The philosopher Bergson described the war as one of ‘civilisation against barbarism’. The English poet Rupert Brooke wrote that ‘nobleness walks in our ways again’,
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and the novelist H G Wells enthused about a ‘war to end war’. Schoolteachers repeated such statements to adolescent boys, urging them to go off and fight. Anyone who dissented was guilty of ‘stabbing our boys in the back’.

There were still wide groups of workers who could be expected to resist such pressures. Socialist movements and groups of trade union militants were accustomed to lies in the press and attacks on their principles. Many had flocked to rallies of thousands in London, Paris and Berlin on the eve of the war to hear their leaders call for peace. But once war broke out, those same leaders rushed to support it. The German and Austrian Social Democrats, the British Labour Party and TUC, the French Socialist Guesde and the syndicalist Jouhaux, the veteran Russian Marxist Plekhanov and the veteran Russian anarchist Kropotkin—all were united in their willingness to back their rulers against others. Those who had doubts—for instance, Kautsky and Haase in Germany, and Keir Hardie in Britain—kept quiet in order to preserve ‘party unity’ and to avoid being accused of betraying ‘the nation’. ‘A nation at war must be united,’ wrote Hardie. ‘The boys who have gone forth to fight their country’s battles must not be disheartened by any discordant note at home’.
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Decades of abiding by the rules of capitalist democracy were having their effect. Pursuit of reform within the structures of the capitalist state led to identification with that state in its military conflicts. In the warring countries only the Serbian Socialists and the Russian Bolsheviks came out in unremitting hostility to the war. The Italian Socialists also opposed the war when Italy finally allied itself with Britain, France and Russia. But their attitude owed much to a split within the Italian ruing class over which side to support—and the left wing editor of the party’s daily paper, a certain Benito Mussolini, split away to wage virulently pro-war agitation.

The belief in a quick victory proved completely misplaced. In the first months of the war the German army did manage to race through Belgium and northern France to within 50 miles of Paris, and the Russian army advanced far into German East Prussia. But both were then forced back. The Germans retreated before the French and British armies at the Battle of the Marne to form a defensive line of trenches some 30 miles back. The Russians suffered heavy losses at the Battle of Tannenberg and were driven from German territory. The ‘war of manoeuvre’ (of quick-moving armies) became a war of attrition, with each side suffering enormous losses as it attempted to break through the strongly entrenched positions of the other side. The expected four months of hostilities turned into more than four years, and spread from the eastern and western fronts to Turkey, Mesopotamia, the Italian-Austrian border and northern Greece.

The war was the bloodiest yet in human history, with about ten million dead—1.8 million in Germany, 1.7 million in Russia, 1.4 million in France, 1.3 million in Austria-Hungary, 740,000 in Britain and 615,000 in Italy. France lost one in five males of fighting age, Germany one in eight. Over 23 million shells were fired during the five month Battle of Verdun—two million men took part, and half of them were killed. Yet neither side made any gains. One million died in the four month Battle of the Somme in 1916, with Britain losing 20,000 men on the first day.

The war also caused extreme dislocation in society as a whole. By 1915 and 1916 all the contending powers realised they were involved in a total war. The outcome depended on directing all national resources towards the battlefront, virtually regardless of the effects on living standards. Industries producing consumer goods had to be turned over to producing munitions. Substitutes had to be found for foodstuffs and raw materials previously imported from enemy countries or subject to naval blockades. Workers had to be shifted from industry to industry, and a fresh supply of labour power found to replace those sent to the front. Agricultural workers had to be drafted into armies, even if it caused acute food shortages—in Germany the winter of 1917 became known as the ‘turnip winter’, as the vegetable replaced most other foods. The diet of the average German worker provided only 1,313 calories a day, a third below the level needed for long term survival, and there were some 750,000 deaths through malnutrition.
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Everywhere governments could only finance their military expenditures by printing money. Shortages of food and basic goods led to escalating prices and increased grumbling among the mass of the population.

It became clear to generals and politicians alike that success in the war depended on the state taking control of much of the economy, regardless of the ‘free market’ economic orthodoxy. There was a sharp escalation in the trend towards the integration of monopolised industry and the state, which was already visible in some countries before the war. By 1917 a British war cabinet report acknowledged that state control had extended ‘until it covered not only national activities directly affecting the war effort, but every section of industry’.
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By the end of the war the government purchased about 90 percent of all imports, marketed more than 80 percent of food consumed at home, and controlled most prices.
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In Germany generals Hindenburg and Ludendorff exercised a virtual dictatorship over much of the economy in the later stages of the war, working through the bosses of the great monopoly trusts.
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Both the generals and the industrialists could see that acquiring territory would increase the economic resources at their disposal. There was a general redefinition of war aims to include not just grabbing or defending colonies in Asia or Africa, but also seizing areas, particularly industrial or semi-industrial areas, in Europe. For Germany this meant annexing the iron-ore producing regions of French Lorraine, establishing German control over Belgium, central Europe and Romania, and building a German sphere of influence in Turkey and the Middle East around the Berlin-Baghdad railway.
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For France it meant reconquering Alsace-Lorraine and establishing some sort of control over the Rhineland region of Germany. For Russia it meant the annexation of Istanbul (promised in a secret treaty by Britain). Just as individual capitalists looked to expand their capital through economic competition, groups of capitalists tied together by national states looked to expand their capital through military competition and warfare. Imperialism was no longer just about colonies, although they remained important. It was now a total system in which no one capitalism could survive without trying to expand at the expense of others—a system whose logic was total militarisation and total war, regardless of the social dislocation this caused.

The dislocation had momentous effects on the working class, the traditional petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. There were sudden and sometimes catastrophic falls in living standards. In Germany by 1917, men’s ‘real’ wages had fallen by more than one fifth in war industries and by almost half in civilian industries.
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Old methods of defending pay and conditions disappeared as trade union leaders threw their weight behind the war effort and opposed all strikes, and harsh penalties were introduced for anyone who broke the ‘truce’. In Britain strike leaders faced imprisonment under the Defence of the Realm Act; in Germany alleged agitators were conscripted
en masse
to the front.

There was also enormous dislocation in the patterns of working class life. Half of working class men were plucked out of their old jobs and communities to be dispatched to the front and replaced at work by a vast influx of women. In Germany the number of women in industrial enterprises with more than ten employees rose by half to just over two million.
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In Britain the number of women in munitions factories alone rose to 800,000.
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Capitalism’s drive to war was breaking apart the stereotypical family which the system had tried so hard to impose. In the long term this would spread the attitudes previously characteristic of groups such as textile workers to much wider layers of working class women, giving them a new sense of equality with men. But the immediate effect was to double the burden which they had to cope with. They had somehow to juggle long hours in a factory with bringing up children on their own. It was often as much as they could do to keep body and soul together.

Hardship, confusion, disorientation and an inability to defend traditional ways of working and living—such were the conditions in working class localities in the first years of the war. As living standards fell, working hours were extended, conditions in the factories grew more dangerous, and the number of strikes dropped sharply. But by 1915 and 1916 the desperation was also breeding resistance. There were spontaneous protests in working class communities which were suffering—mainly from the women in those communities. The great rent strike in Glasgow in 1915 or the local protests over food shortages in many German towns in the winters of 1916 and 1917 were typical. There were also growing numbers of strikes among the male workers who had been least hit by the pressure to join the armed forces—the skilled metal workers, who were regarded as essential to the war effort. Their networks of union activists—the shop stewards in cities like Glasgow, Sheffield, Berlin, Budapest and Vienna—remained intact. As the hardship increased, the two sorts of protest began to connect both with one another and with a certain questioning of the war. The leaders of the strikes were often socialists who opposed the war, even if many of the strikers still felt they had to support ‘their own side’.

Meanwhile, the millions of men at the various fronts were undergoing experiences for which nothing in life had prepared them. They soon discovered that the war was not a pleasant jaunt to Berlin or Paris, or some great adventure. It was mud, boredom, bad food and the horror of death all around them. For the working class or peasant conscripts of ‘the poor bloody infantry’, it also involved the knowledge that life was very different for the generals and staff officers, with good food and wine, comfortable billets and conscripted men to wait on them. This did not lead to automatic rebellion. Many of the conscripts came from backgrounds with no tradition of resistance to orders from above. Habits of deference and obedience hammered into their heads since early childhood could lead to men doggedly accepting their fate, and treating it as just another boring and distasteful job they had to do—especially since any act of resistance would be met with the full weight of military ‘justice’. ‘The strange look on all faces’ of the men waiting to go back to the front, noted the British officer and war poet Wilfred Owen, ‘was not despair or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s’.
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