A world undone: the story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 (84 page)

Bethmann Hollweg saw things more clearly. Though he exasperated friends and enemies alike with his shifting opinions and pursuit of compromise, the chancellor was consistent in believing that a negotiated peace was Germany’s only hope. He also saw constitutional reform—democratization—as necessary to maintain the morale of the nation. By April he was publicly advocating the elimination of Prussia’s three-tiered electoral system, which reserved almost all political power to the property-owning classes. Bethmann understood that the war had made such arrangements no longer sustainable: the people were unwilling to tolerate them. In proposing reform, however, he accomplished nothing except a multiplication of his influential enemies. Hindenburg and Ludendorff felt confirmed in their certainty that he was a radical in bureaucrat’s clothing and must be removed. The kaiser, himself a waffler and increasingly unable to assert himself, was generally inclined to agree with Bethmann. By repeatedly refusing to replace the chancellor, he made himself an object of contempt among the conservatives and accelerated the process by which he was becoming a marginal figure.

In the near term Germany’s problems were almost trivial when compared with those facing the French in the aftermath of the Nivelle offensive. The French army, or a dangerously big part of it, was in open rebellion, refusing to obey orders, assaulting and even killing officers, deserting. Troops were crowding into Paris in a state of extreme disorder. French archives on the mutiny have been sealed since the war and will remain so until 2017, but enough is known to make clear that at its peak it was a threat to the survival of the republic. Within six weeks of its start half of the French divisions on the Western Front were rendered nonfunctional as a result of what one officer called “a sort of moral nihilism, an army without faith.” The government, more euphemistically, described the problem as “collective indiscipline.”

With minor exceptions, the mutiny was never genuinely revolutionary in impulse—it was not aimed at overthrowing the government or even at ending the war. Rather, it was a kind of spontaneous strike through which the soldiers declared their refusal to continue living in intolerable conditions and dying to no purpose. Thus it was susceptible to being defused with practical remedies aimed at legitimate and manageable grievances. And France, unlike Russia, possessed the means to make the necessary reforms. It had ample food and matériel and money and a reasonably competent government.

For a variety of reasons the Germans remained ignorant of the mutiny and unable to take advantage of it. Had they done so when the rebellion was at its height, they might have met with little resistance in moving on Paris. Before that could happen, however, Henri-Philippe Pétain took up his new responsibilities as commander in chief. His appointment was a stroke of good fortune for the Entente.

Pétain acted as quickly and firmly as he had upon arriving at Verdun in 1916. And he displayed great delicacy of judgment, neither cracking down so hard on the troops as to provoke worse resistance nor allowing the army to drift into deeper confusion. His first moves were aimed at reestablishing discipline. Thousands of soldiers accused of being the mutiny’s ringleaders were arrested and brought to trial. Approximately five hundred of them were condemned to death, though fewer than a hundred were actually executed. (The exact numbers will remain uncertain until the records are made public.) Many went to prison, many were exiled to France’s colonies, and those returned to active service found themselves subjected to the traditional forms of discipline in undiluted form.

Almost as quickly, however, Pétain also began addressing the abuses that had sparked the mutiny, “not forgetting the fact,” he said, “that the mutineers were men who have been with us in the trenches for three years, our soldiers.” He promised to provide many of the things that the men demanded—better food, decent shelter when not on the front lines, fairness in such matters as the granting of leave, an end to the pointless offensives that had squandered so many lives. And he saw to it that his promises were kept. Pétain himself visited ninety divisions during the crisis, standing atop his automobile to talk with the troops, listening to questions and complaints, giving straight answers. He had the great advantage of his reputation as a general who had always showed genuine concern for the well-being of the poilus.

It worked. At the height of the crisis, in late May and early June, new outbreaks were occurring at a rate of more than half a dozen every day. There began to be talk of political revolution, of forcing an end to the war. But by mid-July the mutiny was essentially at an end. Pétain had been as good as his word: not only were hundreds of thousands of soldiers given leave, but they received preferential treatment from the railroads in order to get home without delay. Not only were new facilities constructed for units being rested after service at the front, but these facilities were for the first time situated far enough behind the lines to be safe from enemy guns. It was too soon for Pétain to keep his promise that there would be no more insanely wasteful offensives, but the troops had been given reason to trust him and seemed prepared to do so.

Still, even with the crisis behind it, the army was in a badly shaken state. Major new campaigns were out of the question. The Germans too were in fragile condition after Arras and the Chemin des Dames; much of the Russian army had disintegrated; and the Austrians, Turks, and Italians could do little more than flail feebly away on their various fronts. In every case outright collapse appeared to be somewhere between possible and imminent.

Britain seemed in a universe of its own, somewhere above the general calamity. The U-boat campaign was at its height and creating serious problems, sinking more than eight hundred and forty tons of shipping in April, a third more than the campaign’s planners had said would be needed monthly to bring the British to their knees. But the solution had emerged. Early in May a first convoy of merchantmen guarded by destroyers set out from Gibraltar and reached England without loss. The British admirals had been reluctant to try the convoy system because it was in a sense counterintuitive, requiring every ship in a formation to proceed at the speed of the slowest. But Lloyd George insisted, and as soon as the idea was tried, any possibility that the U-boats would achieve their objectives disappeared forever. Britain experienced industrial and to a lesser extent political turbulence, with workers striking for better pay and conditions and the socialists demanding peace. But this was nothing compared to what was happening in Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany. The BEF had taken substantial losses at Arras, but that problem too was small compared with those of the French.

Britain and its army seemed blessed.

That would be the next thing to change.

Background

THE WAR AND POETRY

HISTORIC EVENTS ARE OFTEN SAID TO HAVE “CHANGED
everything.” In the case of the Great War this is, for once, true. The war really did change everything: not just borders, not just governments and the fate of nations, but the way people have seen the world and themselves ever since. It became a kind of hole in time, leaving the postwar world permanently disconnected from everything that had come before.

As Samuel Hynes details in his brilliant study War Imagined, the events of 1914–18 produced “the most important and wide-ranging cultural change in modern English history.” To grasp the truth of this—and it does not apply to England only—it is necessary only to look at the literature of the war years, and at the strange way that literature came to a stop, appeared to be dead for a while, and then started up again on an entirely new plane.

The start of the war brought an explosion of writing everywhere. It was the age before radio and television, when poetry still mattered to millions of people, and in August 1914 newspapers were being sent hundreds of poems every day. Almost all of them were amateurish at best, but the subject matter was uniformly lofty: the greatness of this new crusade, the glory of the cause, the heroism of those who had “fallen” on “the field of honor.” If poems expressing a less exalted view of the conflict were submitted, few editors in Austria, Britain, France, Germany, or Russia showed any interest in printing them.

Many leading men of letters enlisted their pens in the war effort. In England James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Robert Bridges, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, John Masefield, Arthur Pinero, H. G. Wells—they and many others accepted the Asquith government’s invitation to help the nation understand what it was fighting for and why the sacrifices that lay ahead could be embraced with pride. German writers, artists, and intellectuals, stung by stories in Entente newspapers about atrocities committed by Berlin’s troops in Belgium and elsewhere, signed and published declarations of the justice of their homeland’s cause. The most conspicuous, bearing the signatures of nearly a hundred prominent figures, was addressed “To the Cultured World.” Thomas Mann, a future Nobel Prize winner, was among those swept up in the euphoria. The war, he said, was “a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace an element of civil corruption?”

There were side currents in the flood of patriotic words. The novelist Henry James, an American who had made England his home and would take up British citizenship before his death during the war, was in despair from the beginning. He called the war “this abyss of blood and darkness” and saw the fact that such a thing could happen as a nullification of everything he had believed about Europe, its civilization, and his own work. At the other end of the spectrum were men who, like Mann, wrote of the war as a kind of gift, a purifying fire that would burn away the rotten parts of a sick and effete culture.

The young Rupert Brooke saw it as heroic, beautiful,
and
purifying. He contemplated death in battle and found it pleasing.

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich dust a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in this eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts of England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

As art this is High Treacle, but to English readers in 1914 it was Shakespearean. Brooke was dead several months after he wrote it. Of blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite on a troop ship off Gallipoli. His “corner of a foreign field” is on the Aegean island of Skyros.

As the war wore on without result, the flow of noble feelings set to verse continued unabated. Increasingly, though, it was mere empty verbiage, an unloading of exhausted and irrelevant clichés, poetry done by the numbers. Almost nothing authentic, nothing that expressed the experiences of the men in the trenches or even their families at home, was showing up in print. More and more of the great men of letters were falling silent, as if acknowledging that there was nothing they could say. Those who continued in the old vein began to meet with resentment from men who had been to the front. When a young infantry officer named Roland Leighton received a volume of Brooke’s poems from his fiancée, he wrote back in a tone the young lady could not have expected.

“Let him who thinks that War is a glorious golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honor and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with as thoughtless and fervid a faith as inspired the priests of Baal to call on their own slumbering deity,” he wrote, “let him look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half-crouching as it fell, supported on one arm, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped around it; and let him realize how grand & glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence. Who is there who has known and seen who can say that Victory is worth the death of even one of these?”

Leighton too was soon dead. Killed hours before he was to go home on leave and be married. (His fiancée, Vera Brittain, went on to write a book, Testament of Youth, which has remained in print ever since and is among the Great War’s classics.)

Literary and artistic life came to be paralyzed by a sense that the established and accepted ways of representing reality—pictures of romantic warriors performing wondrous feats, words about honor and duty and glory—didn’t fit with what was happening on the Western Front, and that every effort to make them fit could produce only rubbish. The words died and became hollow, unusable. Something similar was happening in the visual arts, and in fiction and theater; painters and novelists and playwrights, if they were at all serious, seemed not to know what to do. The less serious continued to treat the war as a medieval jousting match, but everything they did was stillborn, irrelevant, even vile. Virginia Woolf attended a concert where “the patriotic sentiment was so revolting that I was nearly sick.”