Bungling Into Catastrophe

How on earth could such a manmade disaster happen? A look at the events of mid-1914 shows that democracy really does seem more peaceable than autocracy. If more countries had had democratic governments answerable to the people, there almost certainly would have been no war. Though it was a luxury few could contemplate ninety years ago, with the terrible sadness of the 10 million war dead, there has been fairly general agreement since that the war was simply a mistake, a calamity caused by relatively minor issues.

The lesson is that an international crisis can become a disaster, especially if exacerbated by haste, fear and pride, but more so when an autocratic clique makes the main decisions. It is near enough to some recent international “incidents”, including Georgia, to be a cautionary tale. The later British wartime prime minister, David Lloyd George, acknowledged years later, “We all blundered into war.”

Not only were there the immediate 10 million dead (including 60,000 young Australians) and two or three times as many grievously wounded, but the Second World War, including the Holocaust, the Russian revolutionary wars and the Cold War were direct fruits of 1914–18; the Korean and Vietnam wars little less direct results. A grand total approaching 100 million or more dead is likely. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars at least partly result from the instability the two world wars created in the Middle East. Though it cannot be so easily demonstrated, the dislocation of 1914–18 also exacerbated the economic Depression of the 1930s, if it did not mainly cause it.

No great issues were at stake, no country seriously wanted war, nor were there any very bad men, just bad judgment and flawed systems. Short-sighted bureaucrat-hawks prevailed on the day. Few of the supposedly “underlying” causes advanced over the years have withstood much scrutiny, other than the faultiness of autocracy and to some extent “militarism”—whatever that precisely means.

The main events leading to war were:

• On June 28, 1914, Serb nationalists in Bosnia (their descendants have been in the news again recently) assassinated the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Franz Ferdinand, while he was visiting Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. They wanted the Bosnian province, culturally mixed as today, freed from the empire and included in independent Serbia.

• Austria demanded revenge and control over Serbia, which it blamed for the murder, rightly or wrongly. Serbia rejected one part of a deal negotiated between them, which was otherwise favourable to the Austrians and humiliating for Serbia. The Serbs would not let Austria intervene in their judicial system, but agreed to several other onerous demands and a European Conference, under which Austria could temporarily occupy the Serb capital, Belgrade. Demanding complete compliance and after some skirmishing, Austria on July 28 declared war on Serbia, sending troops into Belgrade.

• This brought Serbia’s alliance with Russia into play. Moscow was committed to standing by smaller, weaker Slav countries, particularly Orthodox ones, as it still is. Its hawks were concerned that Moscow had stayed out of a previous Balkans fight and would lose credibility if it did so again.

• Germany agreed to support the militarily weaker Austro-Hungarian empire, its main defence ally. Both grasped the opportunity to trounce and dismember Serbia. They wanted its fate to be a warning to other minorities hoping to split off from Vienna’s fraying empire. In particular, they feared that other southern Slav people would join Serbia in an independent Yugoslavia (which happened anyway).

• Germany’s entry brought in France and Britain. France had a mutual assistance pact with Russia to defend itself against Germany, which had beaten it in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–71. Britain had a looser “triple entente” of friendship with both.

By the end of July all the powers involved were mobilising for war, initially more for a “sabre rattling” show of force than with any definite intention to fight. “Mobilisation” meant calling up millions of army reserves and thousands of trains, crowded with vast conscripted armies, steaming to the front. A last-minute scramble all round to stop the looming disaster was too late.

Until then, the world had been travelling fairly well, with prosperity and a comfortable rate of progress. There were international tensions but no more than at most other times, notwithstanding some romantic bluster about “the cleansing power of war”.

Britain and France were “super powers” with large empires and a corresponding sense of global responsibility. In 1914, as to a lesser extent in 1939, the USA was not yet involved.

Next day Britain sent Germany an ultimatum to withdraw by midnight. When there was no reply it declared war on Germany. On August 3, Australia went to war during a federal election campaign. After cabinet met in Melbourne, Prime Minister Joseph Cook announced an initial commitment of the navy and 20,000 men. At country election meetings four days earlier, in the spirit of campaign rhetoric, Cook had promised to commit all resources if there was war. The Opposition leader, Labor’s Andrew Fisher, promised support to “the last man and the last shilling”. He won the election—and a poisoned chalice.

Until that week the European troubles had been a secondary item in the newspapers, here and in Britain. We, too, were responding to a defence alliance, through the British empire. There was also immediate danger. As Australia was a British and French ally, our shipping and even our coast could have been subject to attack, given Germany’s Pacific interests.

As the world is still reminded several times a year, both sides dug into trenches and little changed, other than millions dead or maimed, until the German forces began to collapse in the second half of 1918.

The chief mistake, at least with the benefit of hindsight, was that Germany “egged on” Vienna to a confrontation Austria lacked the military strength to win alone. Berlin wanted to prevent the break-up of Austria-Hungary, its only dependable ally, but it was wary of becoming involved in Austria’s vulnerability in the strife-prone Balkan states. The Sarajevo assassination changed that. The furious, fearful German Kaiser Wilhelm saw it as unforgivable “regicide” and wanted Serbia “wiped out”.

Until the Belgian invasion, British press extracts published here show there was considerable sympathy in London for Germany’s “encircled” position. Further, Russian domination of Europe was feared as much as German.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany had its unattractive features, but until mid-1914, militarism and belligerence apart, it was one of the world’s better societies: semi-democratic, stable, technically advanced, prosperous and fairly free—not comparable with the Third Reich of less than twenty years later. It had, however, only limited parliamentary government. The Kaiser, an hereditary monarch, had absolute power, subject to laws and to some extent budgets made by the fairly representative Reichstag (national parliament). There was no modern cabinet government.

The “Schlieffen Plan”, the secret crisis plan to invade France through Belgium, was an old one, hastily implemented without scrutiny for hidden traps. Pulled from a drawer where it had lain since 1905, it proved to be so flawed as to suggest that it had never been properly examined. Its author, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Chief of the Great General Staff 1890–1906, was an obsessive but narrowly technical military planner. He had the Kaiser’s strong support, and an aura of untouchability developed around “the plan”.

Traps revealed in practice, other than the unconsidered international outrage over the invasion of Belgium, included the difficulty of turning back the troop trains once they approached the border, and the unrealistically tight timing required for success. The plan envisaged a holding operation in the east—where the Russians were coming—while France was tamed. It gave inadequate attention to how to feed and provision the troops in the meantime, and Germany was lucky its swoop was near harvest time. It is unclear how the big German army, even if it had conquered Paris, could have then reached the eastern front through hostile countryside in time to shore up the smaller army there against Russian invasion.

Similar political systems applied in Moscow and Vienna, the two other capitals where the critical decisions leading to war were made. It was unfortunate that none of the three monarchs involved was the wisest card in the pack.

Britain’s Westminster system was also imperfect, but the executive was responsible to a fairly democratic parliament. Public opinion was—as in Germany and elsewhere—strongly divided. The opposition Conservatives and a supporting section of the press were going through a “jingo” phase, hawkish on defence, ardently for the empire and often anti-German. Some with this view looked back to Napoleon—then little further away in time than the First World War is now—and feared that bellicose Germany had similar ambitions. There was popular fear of German invasion.

France could choose only surrender or war, but the invasion of Belgium put Britain in a difficult situation, where whatever it did was likely to be wrong. Some argued (then and now) that London might have done better to stay out. The opposite criticism is that Britain should have made its commitment to France clearer from the beginning of the crisis, as this might have deterred the German adventure. A premature declaration either way, however, could have weakened any influence Britain had and would have been politically difficult, given division over what to do.

Another argument is that a neutral Britain, or one relying only on a naval blockade, might have been able to broker an early compromise. A British strike into Belgium behind the German lines was a further option debated at the time. Another suggested alternative has been an earlier British attack in the south-east rather than France; a bigger, better Gallipoli, for example.

Unlike the big continental conscript armies, the British army was volunteer, relatively small, under-equipped and generally under-developed. Britain’s strength was at sea. In German eyes, the British army was too small to make much difference either way in the critical first stage. Even with their empires and after a long build-up, Britain and France together had the military strength only to stop Germany, not drive it back. It took them until 1916 to reach the strength for a major strike against the German trenches with any chance of winning—the disastrous Battle of the Somme.

If Britain had stayed out in 1914, or kept to the naval blockade, according to one optimistic revisionist argument, Germany would probably have won control of much of Europe, but it could not, and probably did not, expect detailed control or a long occupation; its worry was Russia. Something like the present European union might eventually have resulted, as Austria-Hungary was beginning to fragment, with the various nationalities striving for more independence. Non-Russian Europeans in the Tsar’s empire, including Poles, Ukrainians and those living in the Baltic states, also wanted more independence and might have preferred it under Berlin’s leadership.

The war years showed that a naval blockade would not have beaten Germany—though in a less fevered atmosphere it might have been nuisance enough to bring a deal.

The British decision for war was made in steps. Cabinet—comprising bemused ministers with little precedent or experience to go on and preoccupied with their own portfolios—decided only to support the Belgian neutrality Britain had long been pledged to. The decisions to send an ultimatum, declare war and despatch troops to France came from smaller groups of ministers and officials.

The emotional element grew rapidly in the political class, with fear of invasion and concern for Britain’s honour. The spectre was of German troops marching into Paris and the Channel ports (although Germany had promised to vacate these ports after the war). Britain would “sacrifice our respect and good name throughout the world” by staying out, the Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, told parliament.

The critical moments had similarities with Sept-ember 1939, when Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland on a thin excuse. Nervous Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain groped for a compromise way out, but was privately advised that “The House would not hold”. He then sent off the fateful ultimatum to Hitler to desist. Even though a half-conquered Poland was not a practical place for Britain to fight, Hitler had been reckless once too often, as Berlin had been a generation earlier.

In 1914 the Labour Party, influential on the cross-benches, opposed war until it came. The governing Liberals were divided, beginning to tire, fray and decline ly after a long period in office with Labour and Irish Nationalist support. Fighting off both disunity and the Tories and concentrating on a crisis in Northern Ireland, their eye was off the ball until the final days. The “eastern crisis” was far away.

The tantalising thought is that with a little more time, discussion and care all round, the twentieth century might have been very different. But once the guns were firing it was not possible to turn back and scarcely possible to advocate anything other than winning, or at least negotiating from a position of strength.

The men who made the war possible:

Wilhelm II, Kaiser (emperor) of the German Second Reich from 1888. Modern writers seem frustrated in refraining from calling this cheer-chasing scion of the thousand-year old Hohenzollern dynasty a fool. Comments abound such as “neurotic”, “vacillating”, “erratic”, “out of his depth”, “meddling”, “quick-witted but shallow”, “eternal boyishness”, “poor judge of men”, “intolerant of criticism”—but they are often accompanied by “well meaning”. I had to restrain myself from comparing him to George W. Bush.

Coming to the throne at twenty-nine with the promise of a youthful, patriotic Camelot, he partly rode and partly stimulated a fashionable wave of German nationalism and revived the old notion of the “divine right of kings”. He really thought God guided him. Germany in his reign enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, unity and stability. Though not particularly due to him, the good times shored up his popularity, countering criticism and appeals for a more democratic system.

In practice the Kaiser had little talent for administration and politics, usually left it to others, but was prone to intervene capriciously using his theoretically autocratic powers. He also wore the crown uneasily, in fear that social democrats and liberals in the Reichstag, or revolution, would cut him down to size as a constitutional monarch, or tip him out altogether. It was no help that at the very time of the crisis Serbia was introducing constitutional monarchy.

Emil Ludwig, in the German 1920s best-seller Kaiser Wilhelm II, wrote:

“For thirty years this monarch’s own opinions, own volitions, decided all great national problems for his country … an able family came to perdition because he never met with such resistance from his people as in time would have matured him.”

His contributions to causing the war began with irritating and frightening the world by bluster about a “place in the sun”, military glory and expansion. Every time he did so the alliance walls rose higher around Germany. He was behind the unhealthy naval build-up of a few years earlier and the disastrous Schlieffen Plan.

In the crisis of July 1914, the Kaiser took the lead in urging Vienna to reject the negotiated deal with Serbia, out of wild fury about the “regicide” of his fellow Teutonic royal in the Sarajevo assassination. “Serbia must be wiped out,” he declared. He believed his fellow royals in Moscow and London would support him in such a firm stand against a “republic” of “bandits” and “regicides”. He rejected all advice or consultation, whether from his own officials or others.

Typically, when he found his course leading to war, he changed his mind at the last minute—but too late. Austria was declaring war on Serbia, the Russians were on the way; the troop movements were too difficult to reverse. “A sword has been forced into our hands,” he complained.

Once war was under way, “Kaiser Bill” was even further out of his depth. At first he tried to run it, but soon handed it over to the generals. He was said to be in a “cocoon of optimism” and refused to hear bad news.

Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff since 1907, fired the first shot. He ordered the go-ahead with the Schlieffen Plan and fateful Belgian invasion, arguing at the last minute for the Kaiser’s hesitant support. Moltke was a nephew of the military leader of the same name who won the Franco-Prussian war. The Kaiser put him in the top job to succeed von Schlieffen, hoping he would emulate his uncle.

It was yet another bad decision. Unlike the clichéd arrogant Prussian militarist, Moltke was nervy, defensive, dreamily pessimistic, an opera-lover who tended to over-intellectualise—including his belief that war was “inevitable”. He has been described as a courtier rather than a warrior, aware of his limitations as military chief. He became captive of the hawk faction around him. He is suspected of lacking the courage to examine or criticise the Schlieffen Plan. The Kaiser sacked him six weeks after the war started, for several alleged blunders and for the collapse of the early, crucial offensive on the Marne in northern France in September 1914. He had a nervous breakdown.

Counts Franz Conrad von Hotzendorff and Leopold Bechtold, the army chief and foreign minister, respectively, in Austria-Hungary. They were leaders of the “war party” in Vienna, who had long itched to use military force to shore up the disintegrating empire (in which they were aristocratic land-owners). Ardent young hawks surrounded them. It took little encouragement from Berlin for the “Vienna counts” to declare war on Serbia—as it happened, just as the Kaiser was changing his mind. As with the Kaiser, shock and assaulted honour over the assassination were part of it. Their military problem was how to operate an army of troops that spoke ten different languages. They were not ready to occupy Serbia when they declared war. Had they waited another day, the war might have been averted.

Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Isvolsky led the anti-German faction at the Tsarist court and the Moscow hawks. Critics say he was too quick on the trigger in striking west.

General Sir Henry Wilson, operations chief of the British Army, who had close links with the French military, rightly or wrongly pressed successfully for the troops to fight with the French rather than attack the German rear in Belgium, as the Chief of Staff, Field Marshal Roberts, proposed.

Wilson was a fine military organiser, but like all the above seemed unaware the twentieth century had arrived. From Anglo-Irish landlord stock, he is thought to have been a behind-the-scenes leader of the “Curragh Mutiny” by Protestant Irish army officers which derailed the Irish “home rule” process in March 1914. After the war he stood flamboyantly as a Unionist parliamentary candidate for a strongly Catholic Irish constituency. The Irish Republican Army assassinated him in 1922.

Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Minister, civilian leader of the pro-French faction, made the final decision to send troops to France after the ultimatum expired, following heavy pressure from the French embassy in London. He was regarded as of average competence, a bit idealistic.

Winston Churchill, then navy minister, was the most hawkish of the Liberal cabinet. Other government leaders were generally peaceable, but dragged along by events. They included the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary and Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor.

Sources:

In addition to books cited: John Keegan’s The First World War is a good, modern conventional account, reprinted several times. Liddell Hart’s History of the First World War was published in 1930 and also has often been republished. History of World War I (ed. A.J.P. Taylor) is a popular illustrated history. Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, published in 1999, is more revisionist. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson’s The First World War is another recent one, as is Decisions for War 1914–1917 by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger Herwig, which has a better account than most of the Vienna decisions. The Australian press of the day is also a good source.