A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (74 page)

Innocent, but not bystanders: these French refugees join the countless millions of civilians whose lives were turned upside down by the world’s first total war.

Chapter 25

Turnips and Submarines

“I could not advise His Majesty to do otherwise than accept the opinion of his military advisors.”

—T
HEOBALD VON
B
ETHMANN
H
OLLWEG

B
y the winter of 1916–17 the Central Powers had more reason than ever to want the war brought to a swift conclusion. Their military situation was far grimmer than it had been a year earlier: the Austro-Hungarian armies broken beyond hope of repair, the Germans exhausted by Verdun and the Somme and the scramble to cope with the Brusilov offensive, and the Ottoman Empire unraveling north and south. On the home front things were even worse. Germany and Austria alike were beginning to die from within, their cities sinking into want and despair, their children literally starving.

As early as October 1916 Germany’s Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg was seeking to get the American president to interject himself as a mediator between the warring sides. This proved infeasible, Woodrow Wilson being embroiled in an election that he was by no means certain of winning. So Bethmann sent a diplomatic note to Europe’s neutral nations, declaring that Germany was prepared to enter into negotiations. He offered no concessions but also set no conditions, rather grandly making note of recent German successes including the conquest of Romania. In spite of support from the pope, within days this initiative was rejected by all the members of the Entente. The Russian Duma passed a resolution stating that peace would be possible only after “victory over the military powers of Germany.” The tsar, in a message to his troops, scornfully characterized Bethmann’s offer as evidence of German desperation. In London, David Lloyd George said the British would “put our trust rather in an unbroken army than in broken faith.” The Entente’s leaders pointed to Bethmann’s failure to say anything about Belgium—a particularly serious issue for the British, for whom permanent German domination of Belgium would be an intolerable security threat. Bethmann himself had recognized that in not addressing this question he was reducing his chances of accomplishing anything, but divisions within the German leadership had forced him to keep silent. Generals and admirals too powerful to be ignored were insisting that Belgium must at the war’s end remain a German dependency or even be absorbed into the Reich. Ludendorff was typical in this regard: Belgium’s postwar dependence on Germany, he said, must be “economic, military and political.”

President Wilson, once he was safely reelected on a campaign slogan of “He kept us out of war,” set out eagerly to become the world’s peacemaker. He issued a diplomatic note in which he proposed an international peace conference. To establish a basis for discussion, he asked all the belligerents to state their war aims—to explain what they hoped to accomplish in continuing the struggle. Germany reacted first, endorsing the idea of negotiations and making lofty affirmations of its innocence and its willingness not only to talk but to participate in the creation of a new international system to prevent wars. It said nothing specific, however, about what Berlin would regard as an acceptable settlement concerning Belgium or any other question. This was the best Bethmann could do; putting the Ludendorff position in writing would have ended any possibility of negotiations.

Bethmann’s reticence did not help. The Entente dismissed the German position as empty posturing and repeated its demand for a withdrawal from Belgium and France. On January 10 the Entente’s leaders amplified their reply, complaining that Wilson had implied “a likeness between the two belligerent groups” when, in their view, Germany and its allies were solely responsible for the war. They outlined an array of demands that began with the “restoration” of Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro and the payment of reparations by the Central Powers. Most ominously from the perspective of the Central Powers, they called for “the reorganization of Europe.” They wanted not only the return of Alsace and Lorraine to France but the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires.

President Woodrow Wilson
“He kept us out of war.”

This was followed by recriminations from both sides, and all hope of substantive discussion evaporated. We have no certain way of knowing whether the Entente really was unwilling to consider anything short of victory or was simply attempting to begin discussions on the strongest possible footing. What is certain is that both sides were afraid to say anything that might be interpreted as weakness either by their enemies or by their own people, and that powerful factions in both camps were determined to win the war. Lloyd George, for one, was mindful that his position as prime minister was dependent on the support of the Conservatives, who would have rebelled if he had displayed any willingness to compromise with the Germans. On the other side, the contempt with which the Entente had responded not only to Bethmann’s but to Wilson’s notes made Germany’s conservatives feel justified in opposing further attempts to make peace.

It had become easier than ever to argue that Berlin had no option but the military one. But its military prospects seemed bleak. Ludendorff, in the weeks since taking charge of the high command, had been reviewing the situation on the Western Front. After two years in the east, he brought a fresh eye to the deadlock—and he did not like what he saw. “Our position was extremely difficult, and it seemed impossible to find a way out,” he would write later. “We ourselves were not in a position to attack, and we dared not hope that any one of our enemies would collapse. If the war continued for any length of time, defeat seemed inevitable.” What was definitely inevitable was that the Entente would be launching new offensives on both fronts in 1917, and Ludendorff believed that Falkenhayn’s defensive system was sacrificing too many troops by holding doggedly to ground of little value. In any case, Germany clearly could not survive indefinitely, much less win the war, by standing on the defensive. The challenge, as Ludendorff saw it, was twofold: to find a less costly defensive doctrine and to arrive at some way of seizing the initiative, of carrying the war to the enemy. The search for a new defense brought out the best in the German general staff. The search for a way to widen the war, for a kind of new front where Germany could have the advantage, led to a reopening of the long-festering dispute over submarine warfare.

By 1917 the war was affecting civilian populations throughout Europe, but the naval blockade had raised suffering in Germany and Austria-Hungary to a uniquely high level. The French, from the beginning of the war to the end, had to sacrifice less than any of their enemies or allies. The Paris government never imposed effective controls on food production or distribution for the simple reason that it never had to: consumption actually increased throughout the war. This fact—astonishing in light of what was happening elsewhere—was made possible by shippers’ nearly unimpeded access to France’s Atlantic and Mediterranean ports, and by the high priority that the Paris government gave to food imports, at least partly as a way of limiting popular discontent with the war. Almost the only general inconvenience was a shortage of coal resulting from German occupation of France’s prime coal-producing region, but even this was eventually made good. Problems had arisen, inevitably, from the 1914 induction of fully one-fourth of France’s farmers and agricultural workers, from the military’s requisitioning of thousands of horses, and from the diversion of rail facilities to military use. But these problems too proved to be manageable. By 1917 butter was still almost as plentiful and inexpensive as it had been at the start of the war—this at a time when, in Germany and Austria, butter was virtually unobtainable at any price and only expectant mothers and the smallest children were allowed even a meager ration of milk.

Planting time in France
Across Europe, with men and animals gone to war, women took on new labors.

The situation was worse in Britain, which in the years before the war had been importing 60 percent of the calories consumed by its population, but there too things were short of desperate. With its centralized administration and strong executive—all the stronger after Lloyd George became prime minister—Britain was able to impose controls on all aspects of the system by which its people were fed. Nevertheless there had been food shortages in 1916 (as much because of the year’s bad harvest as because of the U-boats), and early in 1917 Lloyd George took measures to increase agricultural production. Voluntary rationing was tried, and when it proved ineffective, it was followed by mandatory controls on the distribution of the staples that were in shortest supply. A decline in nutrition manifested itself in a 25 percent increase in deaths from tuberculosis in England and Wales, and in rising infant mortality. Civilian health care deteriorated: hundreds of doctors were with the BEF on the continent, and hospitals throughout the British Isles were flooded with sick and wounded soldiers.

American agriculture boomed as exports to Britain and France increased; more and more land was put into production. Skyrocketing demand, however, caused prices to rise on the U.S. domestic market. Paradoxically, in the midst of abundance and the prosperity that came with it, there were food riots in several eastern U.S. cities during the winter of 1916–17.

In the management of food as in so many other areas, Tsarist Russia was a dismal failure. It had ample capacity to feed its population, and throughout the war it produced more than enough food to do so. Millions of tons of surplus grain were on ships in Black Sea ports, ready for export but unable to get through the Dardanelles. Russia was increasingly unsuccessful, meanwhile, in getting food and fuel to its cities, which were crowded with refugees, including the millions of Jews whom the Russians themselves had driven out of Poland in 1915. Much of the nation’s railway system had been given over to the military, and much of what remained was in disarray. In the large cities, the price of food increased much faster than wages. The infant mortality rate doubled in Petrograd from 1914 to 1916, and by 1917 women working ten-hour days in factories were also spending forty hours weekly standing in line to get food and fuel for their children. Riots and strikes began to break out—six hundred seventy-six thousand workers struck in Petrograd in January and February 1917—and even in 1916 troops sent to suppress disturbances had refused to do so. By early 1917 the capital had only a few days’ supply of grain in reserve and was a tinderbox ready to ignite.