The memory of the incredible enthusiasm of the other parties, of the government, and of the spectators, as we stood to be counted, will never leave me.12
When war was declared there was satisfaction everywhere. In London, Paris and Berlin the crowds cheered the announcement. German artists and intellectuals were foremost among those succumbing to war fever and thousands of students joined the army immediately. At Kiel University, Schleswig-Holstein – following an appeal by the rector – virtually the whole student body enlisted.
What did the cheering men – so many of them doomed to death by the announcements – envisage? Certainly they thought the war would be quick and decisive; in every country there was the stated belief that ‘it would be all over by Christmas’.
The thinking of most of the top soldiers was no less carefree. General Ferdinand Foch, who ended the war as commander of the combined French, British and United States armies on the Western Front, thought: ‘A battle won is a battle in which one will not confess oneself beaten.’13 Such folly might have proved less tragic had it not been coupled with Foch’s obsession with attacking, and his rationalization that any improvement in armaments could add strength only to the offensive. Such generalship resulted in French poilus charging into machine-gun fire dressed in bright red pantaloons. It was only in 1915 that the French army went over to less conspicuous attire, and even that was ‘horizon blue’. In an amazing demonstration of the military mind at its most tenacious, Foch ended the war with his views more or less intact.
Because so many of the ideas, events and even the equipment of 1914 clearly foreshadows that of 1939 it is worth while taking a closer look at this ‘war to end wars’. It was called ‘The Great War’ until 1939 brought another and even greater war. Like that second war, the first began with a ‘blitzkrieg’. Germany’s ‘Schlieffen Plan’ called for a lightning thrust through (neutral) Belgium, then a massive left wheel across northern France to capture Paris. After that all German resources would be turned upon Russia, which would need more time to mobilize its army and prepare for war.
The man called upon to implement Schlieffen’s ambitious plan was Helmuth von Moltke, who said: ‘I live entirely in the arts.’ He proved it by painting and playing the cello and working on a German translation of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Moltke did not capture Paris; but he got close.
According to plan and aided by a national railway service that was built to a military design, Moltke’s armies rolled through Belgium, suffering only a brief delay before flattening its massive fortresses with Krupp’s incomparable howitzers. But the Germans failed to capture Paris.
At first it was a war of movement but then weary regiments, slowed by mud and cold and suffering the losses of their best and most experienced soldiers, came to a standstill. Here and there the order to stand fast was best met by digging a trench in which to shelter. Soon, from the North Sea to the Alps the armies were standing in a vast line of muddy trenches garlanded with barbed-wire and traversed by machine-guns. Behind them the cavalry regiments were held in reserve. There they remained, waiting for a gap through which to gallop, until the war ended. Meanwhile the infantry gradually abandoned their fine uniforms as part of the process of adapting to living in wet ditches where artfully positioned machine-guns ensured that any man who climbed out and stood up, almost certainly died. High-ranking officers – who unfortunately never went to the trenches, climbed out and stood up – resolutely refused to recognize the fact that the machine-gun had changed warfare as much as had gunpowder itself.
Lord Kitchener, who had been responsible for the organization and transport of the British Expeditionary Force sent to France, said: ‘I don’t know what is to be done – this isn’t war.’ What he really meant was that this was not the short sharp action that so many volunteers had envisaged.
On the Eastern Front, the Germans (and to their south the soldiers of Austria-Hungary) faced the mammoth armies of Russia. Their men were stretched more thinly than in the West, and now and again attacks broke through the front-line defences. But for most of the time the Eastern Front was as static as the Western Front. There the weather was even more cruel.
The British and German armies
Unlike other continental nations, the British had never revered army officers, nor indeed given the army much attention at all. Until 1870 the British army remained a hundred years behind the times. Officers purchased their commissions, men were enlisted for life and flogging was a regular punishment. Reforms were slow and heartily resisted. By the time war came in 1914 the small professional army was made up of poor human material. A prewar study found that British soldiers had a mental age between 10 and 13. Many were illiterate. Troops going on leave were marched to the railway station and put on the trains, because of the problems they had if doing this unaided.
Supporting the regular army there was a part-time defence force called the Territorial Army. In 1914 it had about 250,000 men instead of its establishment of 320,000. Youngsters were not given a medical: ‘The men were enlisted only for Home Defence and an inquiry in time of peace as to those willing to serve abroad in event of war disclosed 20,000 ready to take this obligation. The training of the men was limited to an hour’s drill at odd times, and an annual training of eight to fifteen days.’14 The ‘Terriers’ carried long Lee-Enfield rifles and were armed with converted 15-pounder guns, both weapons which the regular army had discarded.
British Lee-Enfield rifle Mk 111
The army may have been unfit for battle but the civilians were in high spirits. When war started in the summer of 1914 great numbers of men volunteered. The nation’s health was still poor but medical examinations were cursory. According to the chief recruiting officer for the London District at that time, some doctors examined over 300 men per day while between 20 and 30 per cent of the recruits were given no medical examination at all.15
By the middle of 1915 over 3 million British men had volunteered to fight but casualties meant ‘the outflow was greater than the intake’.16 To maintain the field army envisaged for 1916, men would have to be drafted. A Conscription Bill passed through Parliament with overwhelming majorities, and Britain’s traditional opposition to citizen armies was overcome with scarcely a ripple of protest.
The drafted men were subjected to no greater scrutiny than had been given to the volunteers. It was only after three years of war that the medical boards were re-organized and improved. Then the doctors were examining about 60 men a day. A very high percentage of these were found unfit for front-line service,17 but by this time many men unsuited to the physical and mental strains of trench warfare were fighting in France.
All through the war there were shortages of uniforms and equipment and also of instructors. The exceptionally high casualty rate suffered by junior officers might have been met by commissioning experienced NCOs, but this was not considered. The British army believed that officers must be recruited from the middle classes.