The Lost History of 1914 Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 Germany: Saber Rule

  2 Russia: Sea of Tears

  3 England: Ulster Will Fight

  4 The United States and Mexico: The President and the Bandit

  5 Austria-Hungary: Franz Ferdinand Lives: A Counterfactual

  6 France: The Wages of Imperialism

  7 The Victory of the Spade

  8 Home Fronts I

  9 Home Fronts II

  An Injury to Civilization

  Acknowledgments

  Image Credits

  Footnotes

  Notes

  By the Same Author

  Imprint

  To the honored memory of John J. Beatty (1893–1982) and his fellow countrymen and women who served in World War I.

  Born in the last year of World War II, I was raised on tales of World War I. My father conveyed affecting memories of London under bombardment by German dirigibles, of a pub brawl between American sailors and English soldiers (“You’re four years late, Yank!”), of mustering the nerve to ask a posh Paris lady for a kiss, and of the thirty-six flag-draped coffins of his shipmates from the USS Mount Vernon, torpedoed by a German submarine in the Bay of Biscay on September 5, 1918, arrayed along a Brest dock and the captain weeping during the memorial service and the tears soaking his blouse.

  After the torpedo. Sailors from the stricken U.S.S. Mount Vernon: The second kneeling sailor from the left is very likely John J. Beatty of South Boston. He banged his head when the torpedo hit, and for a time suffered nosebleeds. After the war he did not apply for disability compensation, for which the standard of injury was ridiculously low, because he could not cash in on an attack that killed so many of his shipmates. Sleeping in his car at WPA jobsites during the Great Depression, he cursed himself for a fool for passing up the money. His family venerated him for it.

  INTRODUCTION

  Very few things happen at the right time, and others do not happen at all.

  —Herodotus

  1914 might be remembered for a coup in Germany, a polar shift in foreign policy in Russia, a civil war in Britain, a leftist ministry in France pursuing détente with Germany. If any of these things had happened, 1914 would not be remembered as the year World War I as we know it began. If Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austrian throne, had not been murdered at Sarajevo in June, the war might not have happened at all. Most books about 1914 map the path leading to war.* This one maps five paths that led away from it.

  I intend the subtitle in two senses. “Lost” as in forgotten, buried under the avalanche of the war. And “lost” as in “did not win.” It is as if the events I relate were in a race with the war; and the war won … just.

  My presentment of the war as contingent on Herodotus’s chancy clock may be unexpected to readers who last encountered World War I in textbooks that depicted it as overdetermined to redundancy. One survey of Underlying Causes advanced by historians lists four Deep Causes, six under System Level, five under Organization and Bureaucracy, five under Leaders, four under Ideas, two under Domestic Politics, and one under State Structure. The subheads range from the Industrial Revolution to Social Darwinism to the Cult of the Offensive to Poor German Leadership after Bismarck, Poor Austrian Crisis Management, Poor Russian Crisis Management, and Poor British Crisis Management. With all these deep psychological (“war as escape from super ego constraints”), economic, political, cultural, and intellectual causes, how could war have been avoided? No wonder historians of the war sometimes stray from the trenches of empiricism into the metaphysical no-man’s-land of historical inevitability. For example, here is F. H. Hinsley, a British scholar, voicing what has long been an unspoken assumption: “If the Sarajevo crisis had not precipitated a particular great war, some other crisis would have precipitated a great war at no distant date.” Not surprisingly, some of the men most responsible for the war took a similar line. According to the Austrian chief of staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, “the First World War came about inevitably and irresistibly as the result of the motive forces in the lives of states and peoples, like a thunderstorm which must by its nature discharge itself.” Chroniclers of “the path to war” need not so explicitly embrace inevitability to convey the impression of it. Highlighting the milestones along the path with one eye fixed on its termination, they wind up, in R. H. Tawney’s formulation, “dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed and thrusting into the background those which they have swallowed up.”

  World War I historians of the Hinsley persuasion anchor their certainty in the fatalism, amounting to a “cult of inevitability,” of contemporary decision makers. Armageddon happened because men believed it would happen. A twenty-first-century generation of historians demurs, finding that “the European population as a whole shared a common belief in the improbability of a Great War” with the civilian and military elite. Regarding war as improbable, Holger Afflerbach hypothesizes, leaders took risks that made it possible. Armageddon happened because men believed it could not happen. Other things seemed so much more probable than war, and some seemed to rule it out. They are my subject.

  Exploiting the recent scholarship on World War I, The Lost History of 1914 tells an old story new, depicting Franz Ferdinand’s death, for example, not as the catalyst of a war that would have broken out over some other crisis “at no distant date” but rather as its all-but-unique precipitant.*

  The German historian Annika Mombauer distinguishes three interpretive stances, or “topos,” on the war’s origins, “the topos of inevitable, avoidable, and improbable war.” She identifies the weakness in the latter two: “War was still avoidable, but only if everyone had actually wanted to avoid it. This was not the case.” To fit what was she suggests a fourth category, “the topos of desirable war,” contending that “war broke out not because it was inevitable … but because certain key individuals [in Vienna and Berlin] felt the time was right for having it.” The argument that the war was avoidable, therefore, if it rests on evidence of “the contingent … mistakes and misperceptions of a very small number of decision makers” during the July Crisis after Sarajevo, cannot address Mombauer’s objection that by then, with war willed, even flawless crisis managing on all sides could not have stopped it. War would have had to be stopped earlier. And, when Germany relied on threats of war as an instrument of statecraft, Great Power diplomacy could not have stopped it. Only events within the powers could have. By exploring such events this book seeks to reconcile the “topos of improbable war” with the “topos of desirable war.”1

  The history I uncovered from beneath the war—the military overturning civil government in Germany, revolution stalking autocracy in Russia, political fanaticism threatening parliamentary democracy in England, incipient nationalism among its eleven peoples haunting the Austro-Hungarian Empire, imperialism in Morocco staining the honor of France and poisoning relations with Germany—challenges the received image of the Belle Époque as a “Golden Age of Security,” as the Viennese author and playwright Stefan Zweig remembered it. Only for a sliver of Europeans was that true, and then only on holidays. At work men like Zweig’s industrialist father worried about strikes (two thousand in Britain in 1912, four thousand in Russia in the first six months of 1914) shutting down their factories and Socialist parties winning power in Europe’s parliaments. “Socialists! The word had a peculiar taste of blood and terror in the Germany and Austria of those days,” Zweig recalled, “like ‘Jacobin’ before and ‘Bolshevik’ since.” Fearful of being swept away by those below, the ruling classes of Europe mistook democratization for revolution, and brooded on “escaping forward” int
o war to head it off.2

  Mexico, the subject of the one new world chapter, was ablaze with revolution. The European powers wanted it snuffed out before the contagion of example, the transformation of brown-skinned people from being the objects of history to its subjects, could spread. Also, the powers had interests at risk in Mexico. The Royal Navy, for example, was switching from coal to oil, and depended on supply from British-operated fields near Tampico. The Europeans expected the United States to back a military dictator in Mexico against the rebel peasant armies led by bandit generals like Francisco “Pancho” Villa.

  The American president who took office in 1913, Woodrow Wilson, refused to recognize the dictator and armed the rebels. This was the only time in the twentieth century that the United States supported a poor people’s revolution in Latin America. No one remembers Wilson for that. In Mexico they remember him instead for an episode of “Yankee imperialism”: sending in the marines to occupy Veracruz in April. Imperialism was not the motive; stopping arms from reaching the dictator was. Forgotten, too, is the historic consequence of Wilson’s decision: It cracked ajar the door through which, most improbably, the United States would enter the European war.3

  Set in the months before the war, the first six chapters focus on interpretively rich episodes in each belligerent country that light up national character. Kaiser Wilhelm judged Russians by the only one he knew, Tsar Nicholas II, a warning against representing wholes by their most atypical parts. Still, the challenges faced by leaders often implicate enduring strains in their nation’s histories; such, at any rate, is the perspective I brought to my portraits of the major figures of 1914. The familiar ones—Wilson, Nicholas, Rasputin, the kaiser, Franz Ferdinand, the young first lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, the aged emperor of Austria-Hungary Francis Joseph—share the stage with unexpected characters like Villa and John Reed, with once-famous politicians such as Joseph Caillaux, Herbert Asquith, and Sir Edward Carson, and with 1914’s hero for unambiguous good, Herbert Hoover.

  Throughout, I treat personality—temperament, grandiosity, obsession, conviction—as event making, even history changing. That Kaiser Wilhelm believed a “racial struggle” between “Teutons” and “Slavs” was imminent was not without bearing on the war. That Nicholas II got it into his addled head to launch a temperance crusade in besotted Russia mattered; as it did that his consort, the Empress Alexandra, was under the spell of the notorious Rasputin, a lecherous peasant faith healer who swayed the royal couple to replace an able prime minister opposed to war with a doddering nonentity. It mattered that Conrad von Hötzendorf, the chief of staff of the Austro-Hungarian army, believed that to break up the marriage of Gina von Reininghaus he must possess the irresistible charisma of victory in war. It mattered that Woodrow Wilson was “ashamed as an American” of the Mexican War of 1846–48, “a predatory enterprise” the United States must never repeat. It immensely mattered that on the evening of March 16, 1914, the wife of France’s minister of finance shot dead the editor of Le Figaro for prosecuting a politically inspired vendetta against her husband, Joseph Caillaux. If Madame Caillaux had missed, her husband would have been premier in July 1914; his foreign minister would have been the Socialist Jean Jaurès, the titanic anti-war voice of the era. Their policy would have been détente with Germany. Because Madame Caillaux had defended her “woman’s honor” by murder, Europe’s greatest pacifist was not in power during Europe’s greatest crisis. Historical inevitability is a doctrine for history without people.

  The last three chapters, set in November and December, depict the war’s transformation of war and of the societies seen earlier in peace. Extending the motif of lost history, they show how the beginnings of trench warfare in November, since regarded as the acme of mindless slaughter, represented a victory for life over death when placed in the forgotten context of the mass killing during the preceding months of fighting in the open. The “trenches,” the defining battlescape of World War I, were war paralyzed; and the General Staffs feared that the live-and-let-live ethic between enemies dramatized in the Christmas Truce of 1914, when soldiers from the opposing armies met in no-man’s-land to sing carols and exchange gifts, would end in war-suspended. Ahead of its hundredth anniversary, these chapters try to distill the essence of World War I—military, political, existential—on the western and home fronts. Toward that end, the text features work by famous artists like Otto Dix and Max Beckmann and now-obscure ones like C. R. W. Nevinson, the British war painter whose Column on the March from 1914 appears on the cover. The art may help readers feel the horror and sorrow of a war that George F. Kennan without fear of contradiction could call “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century.4

  The last three chapters, set in November and December, depict the war’s transformation of war and of the societies seen earlier in peace. Beginning with a reconsideration of the “cult of the offensive” that gripped the prewar military mind, chapter 7 breaks fresh ground, citing evidence that became available only after the fall of the Berlin Wall fatal to two shibboleths of World War I scholarship—the short-war illusion and the Schlieffen Plan.

  When the kaiser promised the German people that the soldiers would be home before the leaves fell from the trees, he may have believed it but not his generals. For low bureaucratic-political reasons, they gave “lip-service” to the short-war scenario when talking to Germany’s civilian leaders and politicians. Long thought to be fools, men like Helmuth von Moltke the younger, the army chief of staff, emerge from the new found history of 1914 as criminals.

  Everybody knows that the German army followed the Schlieffen Plan in its August invasion of Belgium and France. Everybody read it in nearly every work of history published since the war. Everybody, it now appears, is wrong and every work. In August 1914 the document containing this alleged top-secret war plan was held by the elderly daughters of Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the general staff from 1891 to 1905. The Schlieffen Plan was “invented” by the postwar general staff to reclaim the reputation of Prussian martial genius from the ruin of defeat. If von Moltke had not deviated from his predecessor’s invincible strategy, the German army would have crushed the Allies in forty days and won the war. That was the legend. Everybody swallowed it. Chapter 7 will be the first place most readers encounter the real story as pieced together by a U.S. Army officer, who discovered it in the military archives of the former East Germany.

  Extending the motif of lost history (and jostling another shibboleth), chapter 7 also shows how the trench warfare that began in November, since regarded as the acme of mindless slaughter, when placed in the forgotten context of the previous months of maneuver warfare represented a victory for life over death. The “trenches,” the defining battlescape of World War I, were war-paralyzed; and the General Staffs feared that the live-and-let-live ethic between enemies dramatized in the “Christmas Truce” of 1914, when soldiers from the opposing armies met in No-Man’s Land to sing carols and exchange gifts, would end in war-suspended.

  Ahead of its one hundredth anniversary, the concluding chapters as a whole try to distill the essence of World War I—military, political, existential—on the western and home fronts. Toward that end, the text features work by famous artists like Otto Dix and Max Beckmann and now-obscure ones like C. R. W. Nevinson, the British war painter whose “Column on the March” from 1914 appears on the cover. The art may help readers feel the horror and sorrow of what George F. Kennan called “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century.5

  1

  GERMANY

  SABER RULE

  Sometimes “incidents” occur in politics when the nature of a certain order of things is revealed, as it were, suddenly, and with extraordinary power and clarity in connection with some relatively minor happening.

  —V. I. Lenin, writing in Pravda, November 29, 1913

  The Austrian cartoon from 1870 shown opposite annihilates libraries in communicating the essence of Imperial Germany. Conceived in wa
r in 1871, it died in war in 1918. Field marshals were its founding fathers. Versailles, the conquered enemy’s palace, was its Independence Hall. Yet in the years after Germany’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War, the helmet did not smother political life—not quite. The identity of the new Germany was contested from the start. Its brief history saw a culture war between the “forces of order” symbolized by the helmet and the “forces of change” that came to a crux in late 1913. For a moment the forces of change gained the upper hand. No one realized it at the time, but war hung in the balance. Everything depended on the forces of order overreacting to the threat of change from below. The spiked helmet had to be slammed down hard, plunging Germany into months of unrest. Militarists brooded on saber rule, but in the end this is the story of a polity that to humanity’s lasting regret escaped its caricature.

  An icon is born: This Austrian cartoon tells the story of Imperial Germany (1871–1918).

  The cartoon captured what Allied statesmen and publics agreed was the cause of World War I: Prussian militarism. Its first victims, Woodrow Wilson argued, were the German people. The war was ultimately about their “liberation” from the “military clique” in Berlin. There were two Germanys. Once the Allies defeated the bad one, the good one, liberal Germany—the Germany of the abortive revolutions of 1848—would squeeze out from under the spiked helmet.1

  The bad Germany of the Prussian militarists was an accident of history that history, acting through Allied arms, would correct. The accident was a work of war, specifically, the three short successful campaigns between 1864 and 1871 that forged Imperial Germany (1871–1918) from four kingdoms, six grand duchies, seven principalities, three free cities, and two imperial provinces. Only in Germany would the readers of an eminently respectable journal select, as the nineteenth century’s greatest thinker, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, the strategist credited with these nation-making victories. Since the age of Frederick the Great (1712–1786) the army had ridden high in Prussia, but von Moltke’s triumphs lent it unrivaled prestige across the new Germany and elevated the German officer into the social empyrean.2