The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (53 page)

In addition to this general problem of achieving a swift battlefield victory, there was the fact that Germany enjoyed two more specific advantages. The first was that by its sweeping advances in France and Belgium in August/September 1914, it had seized the ridges of high ground which overlooked the line of the western front. From that time onward, and with a rare exception like Verdun, it stayed on the defensive in the west, compelling the Anglo-French armies to attack under unfavorable conditions and with forces which, although numerically superior, were not sufficient to outweigh this basic disadvantage. Secondly, the geographical benefits of Germany’s position, with good internal means of communication between east and west, to some degree compensated for its “encirclement” by the Allies, by permitting generals such as Falkenhayn and Ludendorff to switch divisions from one front to the next, and, on one occasion, to send a whole army across central Europe in a week.
²⁰¹

Consequently, in 1914, even as the bulk of the army was attacking in the west, the Prussian General Staff was nervously redeploying two corps to reinforce its exposed eastern front. This action was not a fatal blow to the westward strike, which was logistically unsound in any
case;
²⁰²
and it did help the Germans to counter the premature Russian offensive into East Prussia by launching their own operation around the Masurian Lakes. When the bloody fighting at Ypres in November 1914 convinced Falkenhayn of the hopelessness of achieving a swift victory in the west, a further eight German divisions were transferred to the eastern command. Since the Austro-Hungarian forces had suffered a humiliating blow in their Serbian campaign, and since the unreal French Plan XVII of 1914 had ground to a halt in Lorraine with losses of over 600,000 men, it appeared that only in the open lands of Russian Poland and Galicia could a breakthrough be effected—although whether that would be a Russian repeat of their victory over Austria-Hungary at Lemberg or a German repeat of Tannenberg/Masurian Lakes was not at all clear. As the Anglo-French armies were battering away in the west throughout 1915 (where the French lost a further 1.5 million men and the British 300,000), the Germans prepared for a series of ambitious strikes along the eastern front, partly to rescue the beleaguered Austro-Hungarians in Carpathia, but chiefly to destroy the Russian army in the field. In fact, the latter was still so large (and growing) that its destruction was impossible; but by the end of 1915 the Russians had suffered a series of devastating blows at the hands of the tactically and logistically superior Germans, and had been driven from Lithuania, Poland, and Galicia. In the south, German reinforcements had joined the Austrian forces, and the opportunistic Bulgarians, in finally overrunning Serbia. Nothing that the western Allies attempted in 1915—from the operationally mishandled Gallipoli campaign, to the fruitless landing at Salonika, to inducing Italy into the war—really aided the Russians or seemed to challenge the consolidated bloc of the Central Powers.
²⁰³

In 1916, Falkenhayn’s unwise reversal of German strategy—shifting units westward in order to bleed the French to death by the repeated assaults upon Verdun—merely confirmed the correctness of the older policy. While large numbers of German divisions were being ruined by the Verdun campaign, the Russians were able to mount their last great offensive under General Brusilov in the east, in June 1916, driving the disorganized Habsburg army all the way back to the Carpathian mountains and threatening its collapse. At almost the same time, the British army under Haig launched its massive offensive at the Somme, pressing for months against the well-held German ridges. As soon as these twin Allied operations had led to the winding-down of the Verdun campaign (and the replacement of Falkenhayn by Hindenburg and Ludendorff in late August 1916), the German strategical position improved. German losses on the Somme were heavy, but were less than Haig’s; and the switch to a defensive stance in the West once again permitted the Germans to transfer troops to the east, stiffening the
Austro-Hungarian forces, then overrunning Rumania, and later giving aid to the Bulgarians in the south.
²⁰⁴

Apart from these German advantages of inner lines, efficient railways, and good defensive positions, there was also the related question of
timing
. The larger total resources which the Allies possessed could not be instantly mobilized in 1914 in the pursuit of victory. The Russian army administration could always draft fresh waves of recruits to make up for the repeated battlefield losses, but it had neither the weapons nor the staff to expand that force beyond a certain limit. In the west, it was not until 1916 that Haig’s army totaled more than a million men, and even then the British were tempted to divert their troops into extra-European campaigns, thus reducing the potential pressure upon Germany. This meant that during the first two years of the conflict, Russia and France took the main burden of checking the German military machine. Each had fought magnificently, but by the beginning of 1917 the strain was clearly showing; Verdun had taken the French army close to its limits, as Nivelle’s rash assaults in 1917 revealed; and although the Brusilov offensive had virtually ruined the Habsburg army as a fighting force, it had done no damage to Germany itself and had placed even more strains upon Russian railways, food stocks, and state finances as well as expending much of the existing trained Russian manpower. While Haig’s new armies made up for the increasing weariness of the French, they did not portend an Allied victory in the west; and if they also were squandered in frontal offensives, Germany might still be able to hold its own in Flanders while indulging in further sweeping actions in the east. Finally, no help could be expected south of the Alps, where the Italians were now desperately calling for assistance.

This pattern of ever-larger military sacrifices made by each side was paralleled, inevitably, in the financial-industrial sphere—but (at least until 1917) with the same stalemated results. Much has been made in recent studies of the way in which the First World War galvanized national economies, bringing modern industries for the first time to many regions and leading to stupendous increases in armaments output.
²⁰⁵
Yet on reflection, this surely is not surprising. For all the laments of liberals and others about the costs of the pre-1914 arms race, only a very small proportion (slightly over 4 percent on average) of national income was being devoted to armaments. When the advent of “total war” caused that figure to rise to 25 or 33 percent—that is, when governments at war took decisive command of industry, labor, and finance—it was inevitable that the output of armaments would soar. And since the generals of
every
army were bitterly complaining by late 1914 and early 1915 of a chronic “shell shortage,” it was also inevitable that politicians, fearing the effects of being found wanting, entered into
an alliance with business and labor to produce the desired goods.
²⁰⁶
Given the powers of the modern bureaucratic state to float loans and raise taxes, there were no longer the fiscal impediments to sustaining a lengthy war that had crippled eighteenth-century states. Inevitably, then, after an early period of readjustment to these new conditions, armaments production soared in all countries.

It is therefore important to ask where the wartime economies of the various combatants showed weaknesses, since it was most likely that this would lead to collapse, unless aid came from better-endowed allies. In this respect, little space will be given to the two weakest of the Great Powers, Austria-Hungary and Italy, since it is clear that the former, although holding up remarkably well in its extended campaigning (especially on the Italian front), would have collapsed in its war with Russia had it not been for repeated German military interventions which turned the Habsburg Empire ever more into a satellite of Berlin;
²⁰⁷
while Italy, which did not need anywhere like that degree of direct military assistance until the Caporetto disaster, was increasingly dependent upon its richer and more powerful allies for vital supplies of foodstuffs, coal, and raw materials, for shipping, and for the $2.96 billion of loans with which it could pay for munitions and other produce.
²⁰⁸
Its eventual “victory” in 1918, like the eventual defeat and dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, essentially depended upon actions and decisions taken elsewhere.

By 1917, it has been argued,
²⁰⁹
Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia were racing each other to collapse. That Russia should actually be the first to go was due, in large part, to two problems from which Rome and Vienna were spared; the first was that it was exposed, along hundreds of miles of border, to the slashing attacks of the much more efficient German army; the second was that even in August 1914 and certainly after Turkey’s entry into the war, it was strategically isolated and thus never able to secure the degree of either military or economic aid from its allies necessary to sustain the enormous efforts of its fighting machine. When Russia, like the other combatants, swiftly learned that it was using up its ammunition stocks about ten times faster than the prewar estimates, it had massively to expand its home production—which turned out to be far more reliable than waiting for the greatly delayed overseas orders, even if it also implied diverting resources into the self-interested hands of the Moscow industrialists. But the impressive rise in Russian arms output, and indeed in overall industrial and agricultural production, during the first two and a half years of the war greatly strained the inadequate transport system, which in any case was finding it hard to cope with the shipment of troops, fodder for the cavalry, and so on. Shell stocks therefore accumulated miles from the front; foodstuffs could not be transported to
the deficit areas, especially in the cities; Allied supplies lay for months on the harborsides at Murmansk and Archangel. These infrastructural inadequacies could not be overcome by Russia’s minuscule and inefficient bureaucracy, and little help came from the squabbling and paralyzed political leadership at the top. On the contrary, the czarist regime helped to dig its own grave by its recklessly unbalanced fiscal policies; having abolished the trade in spirits (which produced one-third of its revenue), losing heavily on the railways (its other great peacetime source of income), and—unlike Lloyd George—declining to raise the income tax upon the better-off classes, the state resorted to floating ever more loans and printing ever more paper in order to pay for the war. The price index spiraled, from a nominal 100 in June 1914 to 398 in December 1916, to 702 in June 1917, by which time an awful combination of inadequate food supplies and excessive inflation triggered off strike after strike.
²¹⁰

As in industrial production, Russia’s military performance was creditable during the first two or three years of the war—even if it was nothing like those fatuous prewar images of the “Russian steamroller” grinding its way across Europe. Its troops fought in their usual dogged, tough manner, enduring hardships and discipline unknown in the west; and the Russian record against the Austro-Hungarian army, from the September 1914 victory at Lemberg to the brilliantly executed Brusilov offensive, was one of constant success, akin to its Caucasus campaign against the Turks. Against the better-equipped and faster-moving Germans, however, the record was quite the reverse; but even that needs to be put into perspective, since the losses of one campaign (say, Tannenberg/Masurian Lakes in 1914, or the Carpathian fighting in 1915) were made up by drafting a fresh annual intake of recruits, which were then readied for the next season’s operations. Over time, of course, the quality and morale of the army was bound to be affected by these heavy losses—250,000 at Tannenberg/Masurian Lakes, 1 million in the early 1915 Carpathian battles, another 400,000 when Mackensen struck at the central Polish salient, as many as 1 million in the 1916 fighting which started with the Brusilov offensive and ended with the debacle in Rumania. By the end of 1916, the Russian army had suffered casualties of some 3.6 million dead, seriously sick, and wounded, and another 2.1 million had been captured by the Central Powers. By that time, too, it had decided to call up the second-category recruits (males who were the sole breadwinners in the family), which not only produced tremendous peasant unrest in the villages, but also brought into the army hundreds of thousands of bitterly discontented conscripts. Almost as important were the dwindling numbers of trained NCOs, the inadequate supplies of weapons, ammunition, and food at the front, and the growing sense of inferiority against the German war machine, which seemed to know in advance all of
Russia’s intentions,
*
to have overwhelming artillery fire, and to move faster than anyone else. By the beginning of 1917 these repeated defeats in the field interacted with the unrest in the cities and the rumors of the distribution of land, to produce a widespread disintegration in the army. Kerensky’s July 1917 offensive—once again, initially successful against the Austrians, and then slashed to pieces by Mackensen’s counterattack—was the final blow. The army,
Stavka
concluded, “is simply a huge, weary, shabby, and ill-fed mob of angry men united by their common thirst for peace and by common disappointment.”
²¹¹
All that Russia could look forward to now was defeat and an internal revolution far more serious than that of 1905.

It is idle to speculate how close France, too, came to a similar fate by mid-1917, when hundreds of thousands of soldiers mutinied following Nivelle’s senseless offensive;
²¹²
for the fact was that despite the superficial similarities with Russian conditions, the French possessed key advantages which kept them in the fight. The first was the far greater degree of national unity and commitment to drive the German invaders back to the Rhine—although even those feelings might have faded away had France been fighting on its own. The second, and probably crucial, difference was that the French could benefit from fighting a
coalition
war in the way that Russia could not. Since 1871, they had known that they could not stand alone against Germany; the 1914–1918 conflict simply confirmed that judgment. This is not to downgrade the French contribution to the war, either in military or economic items, but merely to put it in context. Given that 64 percent of the nation’s pig-iron capacity, 24 percent of its steel capacity, and 40 percent of its coal capacity fell swiftly into German hands, the French industrial renaissance after 1914 was remarkable (suggesting, incidentally, what
could
have been done in the nineteenth century had the political commitment been there). Factories, large and small, were set up across France, and employed women, children, and veterans, and even conscripted skilled workers who were transferred back from the trenches. Technocratic planners, businessmen, and unions combined in a national effort to produce as many shells, heavy guns, aircraft, trucks, and tanks as possible. The resultant surge in output has caused one scholar to argue that “France, more than Britain and far more than America, became the arsenal of democracy in World War I.”
²¹³