War: What is it good for? (42 page)

Moltke had no idea what was actually happening in September 1914. Reports took days to reach him. One would say the French were collapsing; the next, that they were counterattacking. With no other way to find out what was going on, Moltke put a staff officer into a car and sent him to the front. “If the pessimistic [Lieutenant Colonel] Hentsch had crashed into a tree … somewhere on his journey of 8 September,” another German officer later lamented, “or if he had been shot by a French straggler, we would have had a ceasefire two weeks later and thereafter would have received a peace in which we could have asked for everything.” But Hentsch did reach the front and, horrified by the risks the men on the ground were taking, prevailed on them to order a retreat.

Despite a century of hindsight, we are no better placed today than Moltke was in 1914 to know whether Hentsch snatched defeat from the jaws of victory or saved the Germans from catastrophe. But to men who thought triumph was within their grasp, the decision to retreat was devastating. It came “like a bolt of thunder,” said the commander of the 133rd
Reserve Infantry Regiment. “I saw many men cry, the tears rolled down their cheeks; others simply expressed amazement.” Moltke had a nervous breakdown.

Germany's great gamble had not paid off, and it had no Plan B. However, the alliance opposing it was little better-off. Its own Plan A had been, just as the Germans expected, to crush Germany between simultaneous attacks from France and Russia, but by October the Russians had suffered a string of defeats, and the French were lucky still to be in the war. The Anglo-Franco-Russian alliance did have a Plan B, in which Britain's huge fleet would bottle up Germany's battleships in their harbors, impose a naval blockade, and snap up the enemy's overseas colonies. With the exception of East Africa, where an extraordinary German colonel was still waging guerrilla war when hostilities in Europe had ended, all this went smoothly, but unfortunately Plan B could only produce victory very slowly, by starving Germany's people and industry.

Churchill, in charge at the Admiralty, pushed for a more decisive use of naval supremacy. The admirals had rejected an invasion of northern Germany as too risky, but Churchill insisted that amphibious operations could instead split open the Central Powers' soft underbelly. A landing at Salonica (ignoring the detail that Greece was neutral) got nowhere; another in Iraq led to a humiliating surrender; and a third, at Gallipoli, was such a disaster that it almost ended Churchill's career. By 1915, even the most determined navalists recognized that the war would be won or lost on land.

But how to do that? There is a saying that generals always refight the last war, but initially Europe's military men were even further behind the times. The Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars had shown that armies could not survive in the open against modern firepower, and as long ago as the 1860s the last stages of the American Civil War had revealed that troops who dug trenches were almost immovable. Yet in 1914, the armies massed their men, unfurled their flags, and charged, much as they had in Napoleon's day.
Offensive à outrance
was their motto: “Attack to excess.”

Just three weeks into the war, a young French lieutenant named Charles de Gaulle was shot leading one such charge in Belgium. “The enemy's fire was precise and concentrated,” he later wrote. “Second by second the hail of bullets and the thunder of shells grew stronger. Those who survived lay flat on the ground, amid the screaming wounded and the humble corpses. With affected calm, the officers let themselves be killed standing upright … but all to no purpose. In an instant it had become
clear that not all the courage in the world could withstand this fire.” Ernst Jünger, who served Germany with much the same reckless bravery that de Gaulle displayed for France, coined the perfect label for this as the title of his war memoirs (to my mind, the finest ever written):
Storm of Steel
.

After the war, it became a commonplace that the de Gaulles and Jungers had been “lions led by donkeys”—heroes sent to their deaths by champagne-swilling buffoons who knew little and cared less about the horrors at the front. In reality, though, leaders learned from their mistakes just as quickly as those of earlier ages and rapidly modified their methods. In France, it was obvious by October 1914 that with millions of men crammed into a three-hundred-mile front, continuous lines of trenches from Switzerland to the North Sea were perfectly possible, and once both sides had dug trenches, the overriding question became how to break through them.

At first, the answer seemed obvious. “Breaking through the enemy's lines,” the British commander concluded in January 1915, “is largely a question of expenditure of high-explosive ammunition. If sufficient ammunition is forthcoming, a way can be blasted through the line. If the attempt fails … either more guns must be brought up, or the allowance of ammunition per gun must be increased.”

This put the emphasis on the home front. He who channeled his economy most efficiently into churning out guns and shells, it appeared, would win the day. In every country, production soared as governments took over everything from munitions and transport to food and wages. Women had to be lured out of the home and into fields and factories to replace the men drafted into the armies; food had to be rationed and distributed; production had to be rationalized to give the armies just enough of everything they needed. All this meant more bureaucrats, more taxes, and more regulation. Leviathans exploded.

But despite it all, neither side could make a decisive breakthrough. Once again, the Red Queen pattern seemed to be at work. The armies' offensive powers improved dramatically. Millions of shells were manufactured, tens of millions of horses were coaxed and beaten to drag them to the front (Germany alone lost a million horses during the war, more to exhaustion and starvation than to enemy fire), and artillerymen became more sophisticated, mixing short, intense barrages with long, sustained ones and firing creeping barrages that moved forward just ahead of advancing infantry. But for every improvement attackers made, defenders found a response. They dug multiple lines of trenches, four or five miles deep. They manned the forward positions lightly, rotating troops in and out of the line to keep
them fresh. Most men stayed back out of artillery range, letting the enemy capture the front lines and counterattacking when the assault outran its artillery cover.

The real issue, generals realized as early as 1915, was that Moltke's problem went all the way down. Once battle was joined, commanders could not control their armies. If their men did overrun enemy defenses, hours might pass before headquarters heard about it, and the opportunity to commit fresh reserves and exploit the opening would be lost. “Generals were like men without eyes, without ears and without voices,” the historian John Keegan observed.

In this age of science, both sides turned to technology for ways to beat the Red Queen. Germany led the way, using tear gas in Poland in January 1915. It was not a success; the day was so cold that the gas froze. But when they tried chlorine gas on the Western Front three months later, the results were dramatic. A light breeze carried the poisonous green clouds into trenches full of unsuspecting French and African troops. Chlorine is a nasty way to kill: it burns the lungs, stimulating them to overproduce fluids; gassed men drown. Although the gas killed only about two hundred men (a mere handful by the bloody standards of World War I), thousands more ran away “like a flock of sheep,” a German officer observed. The rout left a gap nearly five miles wide, but unfortunately for the Germans their own troops were nearly as surprised as the enemy's and failed to push through the opening. By the second day of the attack, all surprise was lost, and because chlorine is soluble, the Canadians who plugged the gap in the line could neutralize it by just tying wet rags over their faces.

Gas pervades popular memories of World War I (“If you could hear,” wrote Wilfred Owen, “at every jolt, the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, / Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud / Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues”), but to armies that expected it, it was more a nuisance than a game changer. Less than one in eighty of the war dead died from gassing, and only one war pension in a hundred was gas related.

Britain tried a different technological fix: tanks. H. G. Wells had written a short story titled “The Land Ironclads” back in 1903, and engineers were already discussing armored, tracked vehicles by December 1914. The internal combustion engine was still in its infancy, and the technical challenges of moving several tons of steel over trenches and shell holes were enormous, but by September 1916 almost fifty tanks were ready to fight. Thirteen of them broke down before the battle began, but the Germans
fled at the mere sight of the others, which advanced two miles before they, too, broke down. In late 1917, Britain massed 324 tanks on a five-mile front at Cambrai and pushed forward four miles—a massive advance for World War I—before they got stuck. British church bells were rung in celebration, but the German line held.

Other innovations were less spectacular, but arguably more important. When the war started, artillerymen often had little patience with technicians who wanted to bring too much science to their craft. “My boy, this is war, this is practical stuff!” one subaltern remembered being told. “Forget all that nonsense they taught you at ‘The Shop'! If it's cold, cock her up a bit!”
¹
By 1917, though, fire control had improved by an order of magnitude—much of it owed to the war's other great technical advance, aviation. There had been no aircraft at all until 1903, and none was used in war until 1911, but by 1918 two thousand planes were buzzing above the western front, correcting artillery fire, attacking enemy infantry, and even shooting each other down.

Yet still the great breakthrough did not come. Despairing, in 1916 generals resorted to making the body count an end in itself. When the Germans attacked at Verdun in February, instead of trying to break through, they aimed to bleed the French white. Seven hundred thousand men died in a few square miles of mud over the next nine months. Nor did the British really expect to break through when they attacked along the Somme River that July; their aim was just to distract the Germans from Verdun. By lunchtime on the first day, 20,000 Britons had been killed, and over the next four months another 300,000 followed them.

Germany generally had the better of this war of attrition, killing more men than it lost and doing it more cost effectively. By one gruesome calculation, Britain, France, Russia, and (eventually) the United States spent $36,485.48 for every enemy soldier they killed, while Germany and its allies spent just $11,344.77 per corpse. Where German efficiency broke down, however, was in the realm of strategy. After starting the war with no Plan B, Germany soon had too many Plan Bs. Some generals argued that Germany should concentrate on knocking out Russia. On the eastern front, they pointed out, the challenge was not how to break through—there was so much room for maneuver that armies regularly did this—but how to sustain advances in a land largely lacking railways and roads. Solving that problem, they suggested, would be much easier than finding a way through
the trenches in France. Other generals, though, argued that Russia was a sideshow; the only way to win the war was by breaking the British and the French, whereupon the Russians would fold too.

First one faction, then the other gained the upper hand, dissipating German efforts, and to make things worse, other influential voices hoped to win the war outside Europe. “Our consuls in Turkey and India,” the kaiser wrote in 1914, “must rouse the whole Muslim world into wild rebellion against this hateful, mendacious, unprincipled [British] nation of shopkeepers.” The jihad went nowhere, but in 1915 the navy started pressing another global strategy. Since Britain depended even more than Germany on imports, the admirals observed, why not use submarines to close its trade routes?

After much back-and-forth, in February 1917 Germany committed to sinking merchant ships on sight, regardless of what flag they flew. German leaders knew that this would probably bring the United States into the war, but as they saw it, Americans were virtually combatants already. Before the war, Britain had dominated the world-system by exporting capital and industrial goods, but now Britain was importing a quarter-billion dollars' worth of American war matériel every month. Adding insult to injury, much of the money to do this was borrowed on the New York markets. German economists calculated that if they cut this Atlantic lifeline, Britain could only fight for another seven or eight months. Provoking the Americans might lead to defeat, but, they pointed out, doing nothing would definitely lead to defeat. To hedge their bets, however, the Germans came up with the staggeringly bad idea of offering to bankroll a Mexican invasion of the United States. This was the final straw, and in April 1917 the Americans declared war on Germany.

This was the moment of decision. The United States was throwing its weight behind Britain and France at the very moment that attrition and a focus on the east were beginning to work for Germany. By early 1917, Russia had lost three million dead (one-third of them civilians), and its army was disintegrating. A mutiny in March (known, thanks to the old-fashioned Russian calendar, as the February Revolution) overthrew the tsar, and the October Revolution (in November) brought Bolshevik agitators to power. Russians now turned to fighting each other, and Germany bullied the new Soviet Union into surrendering its non-Russian territories.

This produced borders uncannily like those that followed the Soviets' final collapse in 1991, except that in 1918, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States received assorted German royals as rulers. “German prestige,”
explained Erich von Ludendorff (Germany's quartermaster general and, by this point, virtual dictator), “demands that we should hold a strong protecting hand, not only over German citizens, but over all Germans.” This included Germans in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was now more or less a satellite of Berlin. Had Ludendorff won the war, a Greater Germany would have stretched from the English Channel to the Don Basin, which would surely have meant the end of the British globocop.