Europe: A History (185 page)
In the colonies, every outpost of the combatant powers felt bound to uphold the cause of the mother country. There was a remote campaign between the French and the German Cameroons. The British seized German East Africa (Tanganyika) and German South-West Africa. In this unequal contest the weaker German party generally proved the more resourceful. The German force in East Africa under General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck (1870–1964) survived intact until the Armistice.
At sea, the war ought in theory to have produced a series of almighty contests between the bristling fleets of battleships. In practice, the French fleet betook itself
to the Mediterranean, whilst the German fleet, after one inconclusive engagement with the Royal Navy off Jutland (31 May 1916), betook itself to port. The British, who could nominally claim command of the seas, could not cope with German submarines operating from Kiel and Bremerhaven which sank over 12 million tons of Allied shipping. The British blockade, which practised unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Sea, contributed to serious food shortages in Germany. But Britain also faced acute deprivation. The sinking of the civilian liner
Lusitania
by submarine U20 on 7 May 1915, and Germany’s subsequent extension of unrestricted submarine warfare into the Atlantic (1917), were instrumental in ending American neutrality.
GENOCIDE
O
N
27 May 1915, the Ottoman Government decreed that the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia should be forcibly deported. The Armenians, who were Christians, were suspected of sympathizing with the Russian enemy on the Caucasian Front, and of planning a united Armenia under Russian protection. Some two to three million people were affected. Though accounts differ, one-third of them are thought to have been massacred; one-third to have perished during deportation; and one-third to have survived. The episode is often taken to be the first modern instance of mass genocide. At the Treaty of Sévres (1920), the Allied Powers recognized united Armenia as a sovereign republic. In practice, they allowed the country to be partitioned between Soviet Russia and Turkey.
1
Adolf Hitler was well aware of the Armenian precedent. When he briefed his generals at Obersalzburg on the eve of the invasion of Poland, he revealed his plans for the Polish nation:
Genghis Khan had millions of women and men killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees him only as a great state-builder… I have sent my Death’s Head units to the East with the order to kill without mercy men, women, and children of the Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the
lebensraum
that we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?
2
The term ‘genocide’, however, was not used before 1944, when it was coined by a Polish lawyer of Jewish origin, Rafał Lemkin (1901–59), who was working in the USA. Lemkin’s campaign to draw practical conclusions from the fate of Poland and of Poland’s Jews was crowned in 1948 by the United Nation’s ‘Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide’.
3
Unfortunately, as the wars in ex-Yugoslavia have shown, the Convention in itself can neither prevent nor punish genocide.
In the third year of war the strains began to be reflected in politics. In Dublin, the Irish Easter Rising (1916) had to be suppressed by force. In London, regular party government was overturned by the formation of Lloyd George’s coalition War Cabinet (December 1916). At that same time, in Austria-Hungary the death of Francis-Joseph struck a note of deep foreboding. The first wartime meeting of the Reichsrat (May 1917) broke up amidst Czech demands for autonomy and rumours of a separate peace. In France, an epidemic of mutiny provoked a prolonged crisis that was eventually brought under control by the combined efforts of the new commander, Marshal Pétain, and the new Premier, Georges Clemenceau. In Germany the Kaiser’s Easter message in 1917 proposed democratic reforms; and in July all parties of the Reichstag who had voted for war credits in 1914 now voted for a peace of reconciliation. On the Eastern Front, after the failure of moves for a separate peace with Russia, the Central Powers restored a puppet Kingdom of Poland in Warsaw. The kingdom had no king, and a regency council with no regent. It had no connection with the Polish provinces in Prussia, in Austria, or east of the Bug. Its formation was soon followed by the dissolution of Piłeudski’s Polish Legions, who refused to swear allegiance to the German Kaiser. In Russia, there was revolution. In the USA, there was war fever,
[COWARD] [LILI]
Austria’s young
Friedenskaiser
(Peace Emperor) personally led one of several sets of secret negotiations with the Allied Powers. In the spring of 1917, in Switzerland, he twice met with his brother-in-law, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma, a serving Belgian officer, who acted as the go-between with Paris and London. He was ready to make territorial concessions to Italy, and accepted French claims to Alsace-Lorraine. But he did not convince either the Italians or the French of his ability to influence Berlin, and was forced to grovel before the German Emperor when Clemenceau eventually made the contacts public. From that point on, the fate of the Habsburg monarchy was tied to the military fortunes of Germany; and all hope for the peaceful evolution of the nationalities in Austria-Hungary was dashed.
5
The entry into the war of the USA, which occurred on 6 April 1917, came after many American attempts to promote peace. The 28th President, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), an East Coast liberal and a Princeton professor, had been re-elected in November 1916 on the neutrality ticket; and his envoy,
Colonel House, had visited all the European capitals. As late as January 1917 Wilson’s State of the Union speech was calling for ‘peace without victory’. But America’s maritime economy was mortally threatened by German submarines; and Germany’s clumsy scheme to recruit Mexico, as revealed in the Zimmerman Telegram of February 1917, finally removed all doubts. Wilson’s idealism openly confronted the secret diplomacy of the British and French. His Fourteen Points (January 1918) lent coherence and credibility to Allied war aims. He was strongly attached to the principle of national self-determination, equitably applied. Thanks to the musical soirees given at the White House by Ignacy Paderewski, he put Polish independence on the agenda.
COWARD
A
T
6 a.m. on 18 October 1916, at Carnoy on the Western Front, Private Harry Farr of the West Yorkshire Regiment was shot dead by a British firing squad. A volunteer with six years’ service, not a conscript, he had twice been withdrawn from the front line suffering from shell-shock. On the third occasion he had been refused treatment at a medical station, since he had no wounds, and, after resisting the sergeant escorting him to the trenches, was arrested. He repeatedly said, ‘I cannot stand it’. At the court martial, the general commanding XIV Corps said that the charge of cowardice seemed ‘clearly proved’. This was confirmed by Commander-in-Chief Douglas Haig.
In due course Farr’s widow, Gertrude, received a letter from the War Office: ‘Dear madam, We regret to inform you that your husband has died. He was sentenced for cowardice and was shot at dawn on 16 October.’ She received neither a war widow’s pension nor an allowance for her daughter. But she did receive a message via her local vicar, from the regimental chaplain: ‘Tell his wife he was no coward. A finer soldier never lived.’ She lived to be 99 and to read the papers of the court martial, which were not released by Britain’s Public Record Office until 1992.
Private Farr was one of 3,080 British soldiers sentenced to death by court martial in 1914–18, mainly for desertion, and one of 307 who were not reprieved. In rejecting the plea of mercy in a similar case, Douglas Haig minuted: ‘How can we ever win if this plea is allowed?’
1
In the Second World War, some 100,000 British soldiers deserted, but none was shot. Recaptured deserters from the Red Army or from the Wehrmacht were not so lucky.
2
Taken together, however, the changes of 1917 aroused great anxiety in the Allied camp. For the time being, the entry of the USA was more than offset by the chaos in Russia. The
Entente
was gaining a partner with great potential whilst losing its most powerful partner in the field. Twelve months would pass before the weight
of American manpower and industrial production could be felt. In the mean time, as Russian resistance declined, the Central Powers could transfer an increasing share of their resources from East to West. The outcome of war was seen to depend on a race for time between the effects of mobilization in the USA and the effects of revolution in Russia.
LILI
S
OME
time in 1915, somewhere on the Eastern Front in the middle of Poland, a young German sentry was dreaming of home. Hans Leip imagined that two of his girlfriends, Lili and Marlene, were standing with him under the lamp by the barrack gate. He whistled a tune to cheer himself up, invented a few sentimental lines, then promptly forgot them. Twenty years later, in Berlin, he remembered the tune, and added some verses, merging the two girls’ names into one. Set to music by Norbert Schultz, it was published in 1937. Inter-war Berlin was one of the great centres of cabaret and popular songs. But
The Song of a Lonely Sentry
met no success.
1
In 1941, when the German Army occupied Yugoslavia, the powerful transmitter of Radio Belgrade was requisitioned by the military. Amongst its stock of second-hand disks was a pre-war recording of Hans Leip’s song. By chance, Belgrade’s nightly music programme could be heard beyond the Balkans in North Africa, both by Rommel’s men and by the ‘desert rats’ of the British Eighth Army. This time, the voice of Lale Andersen, floating on the ether under the starlit Mediterranean sky, bewitched the listening soldiers. The words were soon translated into English, and recorded by Anne Shelton. After the siege of Tobruk, when a column of British prisoners passed through the lines of the
Afrika-Korps
, both sides were singing the same tune:
| Vor der Kaserne, vor dem grossen Tor | Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate |
| Stand eine Láteme, und steht sie noch davor. | Darling, I remember, how you used to wait. |
| So wolln wir uns da wiedersehen, bei der Laterne wolln wir stehn Wieeinst Lili Marleen. | ‘Twas there you whispered tenderly, That you lov’d me; you’d always be, My Lili of the lamplight, My own Lili Marlene. |
When the USA joined the war,
Lili Marlene
was taken up by Marlene Dietrich. It was to cross all frontiers.
2
Les Feuilles mortes
was composed in the wartime Paris of 1943, where
Lili Marlene
was on everyone’s lips. Its bitter-sweet words were written by Jacques Prévert, its haunting melody by Joseph Kosma. Its theme of separated lovers might again have matched the mood of millions. But the Jean Gabin film for which it had been commissioned was cancelled; and the song was never issued. By the time it was rediscovered after the war, the social and political climate had changed; and the English words had lost the original flavour:
| C’est une chanson, qui nous ressemble | The falling leaves drift by the window |
| Toi tu m’aimais, et je t’aimais. | The autumn leaves of red and gold. |
| Nous vivions tous les deux ensemble | I see your lips, the summer kisses, |
| Toi qui m’aimais, moi qui t’aimais. | The sun-burned hands I used to hold. |
| Mais la vie separe ceux qui s’aiment, | Since you went away, the days grow long, |
| Tout doucement, sans faire de bruit. | And soon I’ll hear old winter’s song. |
| Et la mer efface sur le sable | But I miss you most of all, my darling, |
| Les pas des amants désunis. | When autumn leaves start to fall. |
Where were the waves on the seashore, and the lovers’ footprints lost in the sand? But in the 1950s
Autumn Leaves
was unstoppable.
3
In the post-war era, popular songs headed the tide of American culture— good, bad, indifferent—which was to sweep over Europe. The transatlantic sound of Anglo-American songs was destined for dominance. But it is well to remember that in many parts of Europe, in Naples, in Warsaw, in Paris, and in Moscow, the native idioms preserved their excellence:
 | (Not even the garden rustle is heard. Silence has fallen till the light. If only you knew how dear to me Are these suburban Moscow nights. |
 | So why, my sweet, do you hang your head, Look aside and stand apart? It’s hard to speak, and not to speak, Of all that weighs on my heart.) 4 |