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The First World War

First World War Memorial at the Royal Exchange, London

The origins of the First World War are famously obscure, and the problem is familiar to many school children who are asked to work it out. This is a tall order when famous historians struggle. The debate continues, but the work of Sidney B Fay who wrote The Origins of The First World War in 1928 is a good starting point. Fay thought the underlying causes of the war were a secret alliance system between nations, which resulted in a limited war having the potential to drag many others to the conflict; a culture of militarism, and nationalism, and a newspaper press which blew up every little disagreement and problem into a more newsworthy crisis.

Of all of these contributing factors to the First World War nationalism is perhaps the most relevant. Affinities centred on countries had become stronger through the nineteenth century. We now accept such nationalism as a natural scheme of things, but it has not always been so. Before the Industrial Revolution people identified much more with their local area, their class in society, or their religion. With the increasing power of communications it was possible for people over larger areas to feel a form of togetherness. Far more people were voting, and feeling part of the national scene. Politicians picked upon these trends and appealed to nationalistic feelings to overcome the possibility of internal divisions. It naturally followed that countries with a strong sense of their own identity and importance would want big armed forces. Social Darwinists then perverted the work of one of the nineteenth century's greatest scientists by claiming that the survival of the fittest should be applied to nations. Ironically there was no sense of the interconnectedness of life that is fundamental to Darwin's work, the "sense of actual passage" between species that only appear to be separate. Intelligent writers such as Thomas Hardy picked up on this. Politicians for the most part did not.

Ironically in spite of the rampant nationalism of European countries, the reality of their situation was one of an interconnected mass of alliances. Britain had wanted to align itself with its natural ally Germany, who had provided the country with a royal family since George the First in the eighteenth century. But Kaiser Wilhelm, Queen Victoria's grandson was a highly unstable ruler, and faced with his unpredictable outbursts the British drifted towards the French. Meanwhile in the Balkans a mass of ethnic division simmered in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. All of the various peoples in the Balkans wanted to reach out beyond borders to their ethnic "kin." Russia wished to take advantage of the instability, and perhaps extend its influence to the Mediterranean. To do this they allied themselves with Serbia. Meanwhile Austria also wanted to take over some Balkan territory, and had their eye on annexing Bosnia Herzogovenia, which they had occupied militarily in 1878, but which still considered itself separate. This was the reality of nationalism. The countries that appeared so proudly separate were also linked in a web of interdependence, and certainly in the Balkans where nationalistic feelings were particularly bitter it was hard to tell where one country ended and another began.

On June 28th 1914 the heir to the Austrian throne, Francis Ferdinand was killed by Serbian separatists while on a visit to Sarajevo in Bosnia. Austria, having lost its heir, now wished to bolster its shaky international reputation, and Conrad von Hotzendorf, chief of the Austrian General Staff, decided that a good war would do the job. A deputation sent to Serbia aimed to find Serbian government collusion in the assassination of Ferdinand. Even though Serbia had sent its ambassador to warn of the Sarajevo attack, the necessary "evidence" was still found. Germany wanting an ally was backing Austria. Russia waded in and supported Serbia. Serbia did not want war and gave in to nearly all of Austria's conditions for avoiding hostilities, but the Austrians wanting their war took no notice. The Kaiser pleaded for restraint. The British suggested talks. The Tsar in Russia couldn't make up his mind what to do, but once the mobilisation plans began they could not be stopped without throwing the huge carefully planned operation into chaos. Germany also had one carefully built war plan, and when faced with potential hostilities, this is the plan that came automatically into operation. Europe began to slide into war. People seemed to simply want it. Rupert Brooke wrote in 1914: "Now God be thanked, who has matched us with his Hour." Out of this mass of interdependence, and advanced planning, which took on a momentum of its own, the First World War began. By August there was fighting in both east and west. In the east Russian armies had been trapped and defeated at the terrible Battle of Tannenberg during which 125 000 Russians were killed. In the west the Allies were pushed back, the German advance only halting following the Battle of the Marne in early September. The soldiers dug in for the winter, and from now on the struggle would be one of trench warfare.

Statue of General Haig in Whitehall, commander of the British Expeditionary Force

On the Western Front in 1915 the French shouldered most of the weight of the war while the British reorganised. The French lost hundreds of thousands of men at Vimy Ridge in May. Britain began to build a huge volunteer army. Meanwhile the old professional British army fought at Neuve Chapelle, at Ypres, and then at the ill-fated Battle of Loos in which thousands of advancing troops were cut down by German machine guns. Most of the old British Expeditionary Force which had begun the war were killed here. The survivors got on with the job of training the new volunteer army. 1915 also saw Turkey enter the war on the German side. This worried the Russians who felt they couldn't fight Turkey as well as Germany. Appeals were made to the Allies for help. The Allies were themselves looking for a way out of the stalemate on the Western Front. Under the forceful leadership of Winston Churchill a plan was devised to invade the Gallipoli Peninsula and take Constantinople.The details were vague, and it was assumed the Turks would put up little resistance. The landings began on the 25th of April 1915, and the campaign that followed turned into a disaster, in which many thousands of British and Commonwealth troops were killed. Troops were finally evacuated at the end of the year after months of awful fighting.

1916 saw more terrible battles, with a vast German offensive against the French at Verdun, and a British offensive against the Germans on the Somme. The attack on the Somme began on July 1st, a day that turned into the worst day in British military history, with 19 240 men killed. Many of the new volunteer soldiers lost their lives, and the policy of keeping together men from the same areas meant that whole neighbourhoods in Britain lost their young men. Meanwhile in eastern Europe the Russians made gains under the personal leadership of the Tsar. But the gains were won at such a cost that the Russians were ruined. Back in Moscow the Tsar's wife Alexandra had fallen under the influence of a wandering mystic calling himself Rasputin, who was supposedly treating their son Alexi for haemophilia. Rasputin's malign influence did little to help matters. The end for the Russian royal family was near.

1916 also saw the Battle of Jutland, a huge naval encounter in the North Sea off the Danish coast. Both sides claimed victory at the end of the battle. The Germans sank more British ships, but the British forced the German navy back to harbour, from which it never emerged again for the duration of the war. Jutland was indecisive, just like the rest of the war. This wasn't the way it was meant to be. Britain thought of itself as ruling the seas, and thought that at least at sea, victory would be decisive. This illusion was shattered in a year which represented the lowest of low points. In April, a month before Jutland, there was a rebellion against the British government in Ireland, which resulted in executions. In June Lord Kitchener, one of Britain's most visible war leaders was killed when the cruiser Hampshire hit a mine while sailing to Russia. In December the Prime Minister Herbert Asquith resigned, and was replaced by Lloyd George.

Clouds Hill

In the midst of all this it was almost required that somewhere things should be different. Somewhere the great adventure that, quite frankly, most people wanted back in 1914, should happen. There were a number of colonial struggles going on around the world, and one of these involved the Sinai desert, where a campaign was mounted to protect the Suez Canal. In this action several Arab tribes rose in revolt against the ruling Turks, assisted and even led by a British intelligence officer named T.E. Lawrence. Once Lawrence got away from his desk in Cairo his exploits in Arabia took on mythic proportions. He became Lawrence of Arabia, and went on to write The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, one of the best known books to come out of the First World War. Lawrence was a controversial and fascinating character who provided a story the Britain needed. He spent his post war years running away from the myth that he became, conscious perhaps that no man could measure up to the myth required by a country in a time of trouble. Clouds Hill, the little house where Lawrence used to think and write near Bovington Camp in Dorset is now owned by the National Trust, and can be visited.

In 1917 the war began to stumble towards its conclusion with the collapse of Russia. A rising against the Romanov royal family began in Petrograd. The Germans then arranged for the socialist agitator Vladimir Lenin to be transported by train from his self-imposed exile in Switzerland back to Russia. It has been written that the Germans injected Lenin into Russia like a plague bacillus, and Lenin's presence had the desired effect of intensifying Russia's downward spiral into civil war. Back on the Western Front the French army had all but fallen apart, soldiers driven to mutiny by the disgraceful way in which they were treated by their government and most of their commanders. Meanwhile the British lost a quarter of a million men in the thick mud of the Battle of Passchendaele. If Germany hadn't spent crucial months squeezing as much as they could out of the defeated Russians in the east, then it is possible that the Western front would have collapsed completely. As it was the Germans delayed, and when they did attack in 1918 they had to fight fresh soldiers from the United States. The United States had entered the war as a result of German U boat attacks on shipping in the Atlantic. The Germans advanced close enough to Paris for long range guns to shell the French capital. But the effort of this advance brought on a final exhaustion. With the help of armies from America the Germans were themselves pushed back, and by the end of September 1918 Germany and her allies were falling apart. By November Germany was in full scale revolution, with Kaiser Wilhelm travelling to the army headquarters at Spa in Belgium, and then sitting there waiting to see what would happen. The Kaiser abdicated on the 8th of November. He crossed into neutral Holland the next day, and stayed there for the rest of his life, dying in 1942. Early in the morning on the 11th of September 1918 a German delegation met Marshall Foch in his railway command car and signed the armistice. At 11.00am the cease fire came into effect and the war was over. This war which the world seemed to have fallen into by accident resulted in twenty two million Allied casualties, and fifteen million casualties for Germany and her allies.

Tragically this terrible war had not resulted in the end of the attitudes that brought it about. Nationalism continued as a powerful force. In 1917 the British royal family, German in origin, changed its name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor in an attempt to play up to the illusions of national sentiment. It was to nationalist feelings that Hitler was to appeal in the run up to the Second World War twenty years later. As in the First World War Hitler perverted Darwin, ranting on about pure races, the survival of the fittest, and ignoring the basic interconnectedness of life.

I once visited a zoo park,and was told that wildcats were being driven to extinction by domestic cats; but attempts to save the wild cat were being delayed while scientists tried to decide what exactly constituted a wildcat, when the genes of domestic and wild cats had become so muddled. Wildcats are not driven to extinction by domestic cats, because in many ways wild cats are domestic cats. These opponents share almost all they have with each other.

World War One trench exhibit at the Imperial War Museum London

The Imperial War Museum is the best place to explore the First World War in Britain. A small area of trench has been recreated here. The National Trust now owns Orford Ness in Suffolk, which the military purchased in 1914, and used to develop many weapons, mostly related to aviation. Bovington Tank Museum has a collection of fighting vehicles which include tanks from the First World War. Nearby is Clouds Hill, the little cottage once owned by T.E. Lawrence. The life of wartime leader David Lloyd George can be explored at the David Lloyd George Museum.

 

 

For First World War museums in France and Belgium see http://www.greatwar.co.uk/westfront/ypsalient/museums/index.htm