World War One: A Short History (7 page)

However, Falkenhayn had to consider much more than the east. Early in November, the war took on a properly worldwide scale. Its origins had had much to do with the position of the Ottoman empire, in fact the entire Middle East, including Persia. Turkey in general was seen as backward, ripe for takeover by the Europeans, who had a new-found interest in the oil of Mesopotamia (Iraq); the Christian minorities might be used as their agents. One or two men who knew the Turks understood that they were not at all a write-off, but not many had such understanding. In 1914, Churchill commandeered two battleships being built in Newcastle, on public subscription, for the Turkish navy. Two German battleships,
Goeben
and
Breslau
, reached Turkish waters, and adopted Turkish service: public opinion in Turkey became very pro-German. But in any case a pro-German element had seized control of Turkey. Enver Pasha, the Minister of War, and nephew-in-law of the Sultan, was producing, along with other ‘Young Turks’, a species of nationalism. Its model was French revolutionary and the ‘Young Turks’ followed the victorious Balkan-Christian states: a new language, a new interpretation of history, an exclusively national future. Enver and his closest colleague,
Talat, Minister of the Interior, tricked their own government into war. Formally they took over the two German ships and, with crews wearing fezzes and pretending to be Turks, bombarded Russian ports in the expectation that the Russians would declare war. They did, early in November, and much of the Ottoman cabinet resigned in protest at Enver’s provocation. But Turkey had entered the war. Enver invaded Russia, via the Caucasus, and suffered an enormous reverse – 100,000 of his men died from disease or cold in the high plateau around Sarikamiş. A German commander, Kress von Kressenstein, suffered another reverse at Suez. To Enver, this did not really matter: a Turkish nation would be born in the suffering, and it would look to Turkey proper rather than to the Arabic world. This calculation was, in the outcome, successful, though it cost Turkey one quarter of her population and was carried out, not by Enver, but by a much greater man, his rival Kemal Atatürk.

NOTES

1.
At a more mundane level but expressing the same illusion, the Prague journalist Egon Erwin Kisch declined his mother’s offer of spare underwear as he went off to the front: did she think it was going to be a Thirty Years War?

2.
The surname is ‘Conrad’, by which he is properly called. ‘Von Hötzendorf’ is an addition, a predicate indicating nobility.

THREE •
1915

preceding pages: French 220 cannon on the Western Front, 1915

As the Ypres fighting died away and a winter freeze gripped the east, the British took stock. How was this war to be won? History was supposed to be a guide, and here the lessons were clear enough. In Napoleonic times, there had been a strategy to take account of British strengths and French weaknesses. The Royal Navy operated a blockade of French trade with the outside world, and throttled it. Brest, Bordeaux, Toulon withered on the vine, and the French influence on the world collapsed. Substitute industries, taking a great deal of money, were promoted by Napoleon, but they were not efficient, and the French economy was distorted, while French dependencies resented the blackmail of buying indifferent goods at high prices. Meanwhile, since the British monopolized overseas trade, they made a great deal of money, and they could present this, as loans, to Austrians and Russians who did the land fighting. In time, they themselves could mount a considerable military force in the furthest-flung part of Napoleon’s empire, Spain – 80,000 men, by the standards of the time a large force, supplied by sea whereas the French had to supply their own response up hill and down dale over the most barren and difficult part of Europe, beset by bandits of great determination and savagery. Our word
guerrilla
– ‘little war’ – comes from this time. It was not in reality so ‘little’. The British and the Spaniards and the Portuguese mounted an effort that was very
considerable, but it was five years before the French were cleared from Spain. Napoleon called it ‘the Spanish ulcer’, draining his strength, but it was more than an ulcer: it was two Atlantic empires, even three if you include Portugal, against him.

Now, with enormous British naval superiority, was there not some way round the stalemate in the west? Bright sparks wondered, especially Winston Churchill, with his extraordinary quickness and imagination, his wit, his old-fashioned grand accent, his sense of English history. The navy, under his direction as First Lord of the Admiralty – a singularity of British history was that civilians controlled the armed forces, whereas in Germany they took their orders from the military – had mobilized early. Eighteen miles of grey battleships resulted, bow to stern, a sign to the Germans that, if this went on, they would collapse. In fact the first shots fired in the Anglo-German war were in Sydney Harbour Bay, in Australia, when, on 4 August, a German trader tried to leave and was warned off. A blockade of Germany was declared. However, Churchill’s historical sense was deceptive in this case.

The chief aim was to stop German exports. Maurice Hankey – Kurt Riezler’s equivalent in the British machine before 1914, a formidable man, a linguist interested in everything, manager of government business at the highest level, and also responsible like Riezler for the nuclear bomb twenty years later (German Jewish exiles delivered the secret to him in 1940, and he passed it on to the Americans) – said that Germany would be destroyed if her exports were stopped. Here he was, like many other clever people, quite wrong. Nine hundred German merchantmen were picked up, and the Royal Navy (not without trouble) picked up various enemy warships around the world, including the Falkland Islands. However, if Germany were prevented from exporting, the spare machinery and labour simply went into war work. There were no riots in Hamburg – on the contrary, the great trusts which ran German industry
went over to the production of war goods, the banks which were their own creatures financed this, and the Prussian War Ministry knew how to maintain quality control without getting in the way, as its British counterpart did. The effect of the British block on German exports was therefore that the German war economy did better than all others in 1915. The Russians took a year to catch up.

There was another paradox to the blockade: it became a wonderful alibi for bad management of food supplies in Germany. The British were greatly hated, blamed for scarcities that were not truly of their making. Stopping German imports was not easy because they could go through neutral ports, and in any case international law (the Declaration of London in 1909) did not allow for stoppages of food imports (even barbed wire counted only as ‘conditional contraband’ because it had agricultural uses). Under the British rules, neutral ships were supposed to be open for inspection, and sometimes their cargo was confiscated, which, again and again, made for problems with the USA – problems uneasily resolved by offers of postwar compensation. But there was no real way of stopping food imports through (especially) Holland.

It was true that, as the war went on, German food supplies declined, in the winter of 1916–17 quite drastically. The blockade was blamed for this. But the price-control system had more to do with it: grain was controlled, and meat was not, so farmers fed grain to their beasts. In fact grain, directly eaten, gives four times more energy than if eaten indirectly through meat (the two-pound Victorian loaf was enough for a working man’s day). Then in Germany meat prices were controlled, such that the beasts were slaughtered (9 million pigs in the spring of 1915), rather than sold. There was less manure and thence a smaller harvest. Matters were made worse by the failure of the potato crop, and the winter of 1916–17 was known as ‘the turnip winter’, but the heart of the problem lay in
blundering price-controls. The Prussian ministry of agriculture seems to have regarded the blockade as just a heightened form of the agricultural tariff which the Right had always advocated. At any rate, peasants did quite well, while the towns ate turnips and endlessly boiled sugar beet to produce a sweet syrup, which is still eaten with potato-cakes –
Reibekuchen mit Rübenkraut
– at Christmas markets in Cologne.

There was another somewhat perverse effect of the blockade, this time one that had been foreseen but misunderstood. As German exports went down, British ones were expected to take their place: the Latin American market could be recaptured, or so it was supposed. Profits from such exports could be recycled, via war loans or taxation, to the Treasury, and that in turn would mean lending money to allies, such as Italy or Russia, who would do the land fighting. There was, again, some precedent for this: in the Seven Years War of 1756–63, British money had kept Frederick the Great’s Prussia going against France, Russia and Austria, while the British liquidated almost all of the French empire. Now, exports did rise – in 1916–17 to a value of £527,000,000, as against an average of £474,000,000 in the five years before the war. That figure was not equalled until 1951, and it is a curious fact that 1916 was the only year in the whole of statistically recorded time when the British sold more goods overseas than they bought. However, exports took skilled labour, diverting it (and machinery) from war work, and the whole business was bedevilled by another phenomenon characteristic of the time, that vast numbers of the skilled men volunteered for the army, so exporters faced labour-shortage and bid against each other with ever-higher wages. This problem was solved, only partially, when conscription was imposed in 1916: under conscription, exemptions could be made for essential crafts (to the extent that conscription in the end netted fewer men than the earlier volunteering had done). In 1915 these confusions affected the British war economy, and there
was a serious lack of munitions in the spring and summer, whereas the Germans had been forced into a more appropriate approach. Blockade therefore turned into a set of elliptical billiard balls, and was not really properly used until 1918, when the various neutrals, mainly because of American intervention, could be coerced into limiting their trade with Germany.

But there was a further precedent (and this was an age when men were very taken with historical precedents): ‘the soft under-belly’ – in Napoleon’s time, Spain; now, Turkey?

Turkey’s intervention had turned out very badly. The Germans had had high hopes that all Islam would rise against the British, once ‘holy war’ was declared by the Sultan-Caliph. In most places, the appeal went into waste-paper baskets, both Russian Tatars and Indian Muslims making no trouble at all; in any case, ‘holy war’ made very little sense if it meant taking one set of Christians as allies against another set of Christians (and, true to form for the Young Turks, their own religious leader was anyway a Freemason from a grand Istanbul family). The Ottoman army had lost heavily in the Caucasus, and there were already signs of a revolt in the Arab provinces. A British push into the Levant might just finish off the Turks, and the Straits would be opened again for trade with Russia. The Balkan states and Italy might be encouraged to join in the war on the Allied side. Late in 1914, the British offered Constantinople to the Russians, and went on to plan for partition of the entire Ottoman empire among various allies. No one expected the Turks to be capable of serious resistance.
¹
They had almost no armaments industry, and though German help could arrive through corrupt Romanians on the Danube, it was little and tardy. The Aegean, for a classically educated generation of public schoolboys, such as the poet Rupert Brooke, had its attractions, and, for Churchill, it had the great advantage of not being the western front. There were surplus British battleships, dating
back to the days before 1906, when the all-big-gun
Dreadnought
made earlier ships obsolete. These could, it was imagined, sweep into the Dardanelles, the ancient Hellespont, which, only 800 yards in width, had been swum, Sestos to Abydos, in Greek mythology and then by Lord Byron.

On 18 March sixteen battleships met disaster. Their guns were not suitable against the shore batteries, and the Turks had mobile batteries as well; in any case, minefields were unswept. Three battleships were sunk, and three were put out of action. Later, once German submarines arrived, two more were sunk and the fleet had to move from offshore waters in May. The naval commander was always prudent, and expected a land force to cope with the shore defences. But that force had its base in Egypt, and even then there were delays – the supply ships were loaded in the wrong order, and the commander, Sir Ian Hamilton, sent them back to be reloaded in the right order. Malaria became a problem (it killed Rupert Brooke), and in cheese-paring fashion the army, here and in Mesopotamia, did not even provide mosquito-screens for the windows. The Greek island of Lemnos was the forward base, and preparations were all too obvious. But even the Anatolian railways and roads could deliver troops and guns to Gallipoli far more efficiently than could ships, of which fifty were needed for a single division, and seven weeks went by before the landings – weeks well-used by the Turks.