Bamber Gascoigne - A Brief History of the First World War

HistoryWorld's Pocket History Series No. 2

A Brief History of the

First World War

Bamber Gascoigne

The series

HistoryWorld's Pocket History series aims to provide short, clear narrative accounts of important themes in world history. Each book consists of the history itself followed by a detailed timeline of the subject and an index. Together they provide a quick and reliable overview of the subject for anyone, from student of any age to pensioner, who wants to discover what happened and when and why.

This account of the First World War begins with the dangerous arms race developing between Germany and Britain in the early 1900s. Europe seems poised for a war, which is ignited when the heir to the Austrian empire is assassinated in 1914. There follow the four dreadful years of trench warfare, with soldiers undergoing constant bombardment and dying in their hundreds of thousands. The final end is ominous too. While an influenza pandemic adds millions more to the global death toll, the peace negotiators in Versailles impose on Germany a harsh treaty that can be partly blamed for a second world war a mere 20 years later.

The author

Bamber Gascoigne is best known in the UK as the host for twenty-five years (1962-87) of the popular quiz game University Challenge , the British version of College Bowl in the United States. But his main activity has been bringing general history to a wide public, as the author of books and the author-presenter of television documentaries. In recent years this theme has been continued in the digital medium, first in his involvement with HistoryWorld (www.historyworld.net), a website that he founded and launched in 2001, and now through this series of e-books published by HistoryWorld..

Contents

The approach of war

1914-1915

1915-1917

1918

After the War

The approach of war

The diplomatic drift towards war: 1890-1914

In the years leading to World War I there were five major powers within Europe - Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France and Britain. The cast list had remained unchanged since the early 18th century, except that Prussia was now Germany. And the players were well used to the game of diplomacy in which alliances formed for defensive purposes turned into aggressive partnerships as soon as a new war developed (a circumstance considered almost inevitable sooner or later in the atmosphere of national rivalry).

However the 19th century had introduced one new element in the form of very much shorter wars. If the Seven Years' War characterized the 18th century, the Seven Weeks' War in 1866 was more typical of the 19th (the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 was almost equally short).

The idea of rapid victory in a short war was particularly prevalent in Germany, the victor in both the Seven Weeks' War and the Franco-Prussian War. And the German nation was both more hungry for immediate success on the international stage than its rivals, and more nervous about succumbing to hostile alliances.

The reasons were numerous. Germany had recently been transformed by Bismarck from a relatively minor player to potentially the most powerful nation in continental Europe. But as a late arrival on the world stage, it had no empire to match those of Britain, France and Russia. Nor, unlike them, had it a great navy - the most tangible symbol, perhaps, of international power.

German nervousness increased during the 1890s when alliances among the European powers seemed to be slipping beyond German control. Bismarck had worked on the assumption of hostility from France (eager to avenge the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, ceded in the treaty of Frankfurt after the Franco-Prussian War) and of a neutral stance from Britain (historically the great rival of France).

He therefore concentrated his efforts on creating alliances with his eastern neighbours, Russia and Austria-Hungary. To these he added Italy, a new nation on the verge of great power status within Europe. The Triple Alliance, agreed in 1882 between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, lasted until 1915.

Bismarck's chosen path was not easy, particularly since Austria-Hungary and Russia had conflicting spheres of interest in the unstable Balkans. As a result, while Austria-Hungary and Italy remained constant allies (the three nations become known from 1882 as the Central Powers of Europe), Bismarck was constantly having to patch up or renew the alliance with Russia under the pressure of international events.

The careful edifice crumbled after Bismarck's dismissal in 1890. The new Kaiser, recognizing the incompatibility of Russia and Austria-Hungary as allies of Germany, broke off the alliance with Russia. As a result Russia and France, both equally alarmed by Germany, began secret negotiations which resulted in the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894.

Then, even more surprisingly, in 1904 France and Britain agreed an unprecedented Entente Cordiale. Austria-Hungary, a declining power, and the relatively weak Italy now seemed to be Germany's only probable allies in a European conflict. And by this time many, particularly in Germany, felt that such a conflict could not be far in the future.

All the major nations had been preparing for such an eventuality, but Germany had done so in the most deliberate fashion.

The strategic drift towards war: 1890-1914

A popular buzz-word in Germany at this time was Weltpolitik ('world politics'), meaning that the nation must assert itself on the international stage in order to claim its 'place in the sun' (another current phrase). To this end much pride was placed in the plan devised by Admiral von Tirpitz to provide the nation with a High Seas Fleet to match the naval forces of Britain.

Tirpitz's demands on the German government, the Reichstag, escalated in the inexorable pattern of any arms race. In 1898 he persuaded the politicians to pass a Navy Law providing for a fleet of 16 battleships. Two years later a new Navy Law revised the figure to 38 battleships, with a completion date of 1917 for the full fleet.

This level was still below that of the British navy, but Tirpitz argued that it would provide Germany with a Risikoflotte ('risk fleet'), meaning one too dangerous for Britain to attack. Britain radically upset the calculation by introducing in 1906 a vastly more powerful class of battleship, the first of the famous 'dreadnoughts'. Germany followed suit, upgrading its production line to the new standard.

To the German argument that Britain was escalating the stakes, Winston Churchill (when first lord of the admiralty in 1912) replied that for an island nation a powerful navy was a defensive necessity, whereas to Germany it was 'more in the nature of a luxury'.

Meanwhile the German strategy for the army in the event of war was both more secret and more illicit. It was the work of Alfred von Schlieffen, chief of the general staff from 1891 to 1906. During the second half of the 1890s, when France and Russia were in alliance and it was accepted that any war must be fought on both fronts, Schlieffen devised a two-stage plan.