9
GERMANY’S LAST GAMBLE
GERMANY BETWEEN MILITARISM AND LIBERALISM
On 3 March 1918, in Brest-Litovsk, the Russians signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers. In the north-west they lost Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Livonia and Courland. Finland took the opportunity of the Bolshevik revolution to cede from Russia. To the south Ukraine did the same. In the Caucasus the Turks regained their pre-1878 frontiers. In all Russia lost a million square miles of territory, together with almost all its coal and oil, three-quarters of its iron ore, and about half its industry. About a third of its population, 55 million people, and the same proportion of its agriculture were also forfeit. Lenin, who was not present for the final meeting with the representatives of the Central Powers, described the settlement as ‘that abyss of defeat, dismemberment, enslavement, and humiliation’. Three months of negotiation and renewed fighting had followed the Bolsheviks’ initial request for an armistice, and Lenin knew that further discussion was pointless. He had no army to speak of and he had a civil war to contend with: his leverage was minimal. He could do nothing but bank on the hope that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would be overthrown by the spread of revolution abroad. ‘You must sign this shameful peace’, he told the Congress of Soviets, ‘in order to save the world revolution, in order to hold fast to ... its only foothold - the Soviet Republic’.1
Two months later, on 7 May 1918, it was Romania’s turn. Although largely overrun in the autumn and winter of 1916, Romania had stayed in the war in 1917, holding a territorial rump in Moldavia with the aid of Russian reinforcements. France had sent a military mission, and, while the Russian army disintegrated, the Romanian was rebuilt. In July and August 1917, it successfully held off Mackensen’s army on the River Sereth, but its position was fatally compromised by the collapse of its principal ally. On 9 December 1917 it sought an armistice. The terms of the peace treaty were delivered as an ultimatum on 27 February 1918. ‘It was a disaster’, the head of the French mission, Henri Berthelot, reported in his final despatch to Paris. ‘Since Romania was deprived of its frontiers, of Dobrudja, of the products of its soil, of its army, since it was going without doubt to undergo enemy occupation for an indefinite period, what difference was there between these conditions and those which Romania would have undergone after a last disastrous battle, where it would at least have salvaged honour?’2 Even the pro-German conservatives, including the prime minister who signed the treaty, Alexander Marghiloman, were staggered by the terms. The notion of a German-dominated customs union in Central Europe, adumbrated in 1915 in Friedrich Naumann’s idea of Mitteleuropa, had been militarised into a form of indirect annexation. Germany took no territory solely for itself. It gave Wallachia to Austria-Hungary and southern Dobrudja to Bulgaria; as it intended to dominate both its allies, the concession was notional. The direct evidence of Germany’s mastery was economic. It took a ninety-nine-year lease on Romania’s oil deposits; it assumed control of the railways and the navigation of the Danube; it shared Romania’s agricultural surplus with Austria-Hungary, but it established a monopoly over Romanian trade through a customs union.
The bulk of Romania was overrun in a campaign of extraordinary speed, its northern thrust driving through the Transylvanian Alps, and both pincers having to cope with deteriorating weather. By July 1917 the German army has time to distribute cigarettes to gypsies working in the fields
The treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest defined what a German victory meant. ‘For those who think Germany will be satisfied with a peace of conciliation’, wrote a French gunner, the Russians’ cowardice ‘will have made them see what defeat would mean on our front. German militarism must be beaten for ever and that is what must reinvigorate us.’3 Russia and Romania were not the only losers at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest. So, too, were advocates everywhere of a negotiated peace, and they included liberals in Germany.
On 19 July 1917 the Reichstag had passed a resolution calling for a peace without annexations or indemnities. Its vocabulary deliberately invoked memories of the Kaiser’s speech of 4 August 1914, suggesting that this was a defensive war, sustained by a domestic truce; it spoke of freedom of the seas, of the establishment of an international legal body, and of mutual understanding and economic cooperation. The work of a centre-left coalition, made up of the Catholic Centre Party, the Progressives and the Socialists, the peace resolution seemed to confirm the waxing strength of German liberalism. In his Easter message, the Kaiser had promised constitutional reform at the end of the war: his terms had been vague, but he had at least accepted Bethmann Hollweg’s determination that the Prussian upper house should be reformed and that the three-class suffrage which guaranteed a conservative majority in the Prussian Diet should go.
The primary effect was to isolate the radical and revolutionary left. Germany, like other belligerents on both sides, experienced more strikes in 1917 than in the earlier years of the war - 561 as against 137 in 1915 and 240 in 1916. As elsewhere, too, falling real wages and food shortages, especially after the ‘turnip’ winter of 1916-17, were the principal explanations. But there were big variations in individual experiences. In all countries, both metal-workers and women proved vital to war production, and central to industrial unrest. In Germany female metal-workers’ wages rose 324 per cent between 1914 and 1918. On the other hand, those on fixed incomes, civil servants and white-collar workers, the so-called ’Mittelstand‘, found themselves losing status as well as earnings: in one association the average wage rose 18.2 per cent between the outbreak of the war and the end of 1917, while the cost of living soared 185 per cent.4 The lower middle class was therefore radicalised by the war as much as the skilled male or the unskilled female. In January and February 1917 strikers in the Ruhr and in Berlin, female metal-workers at their head, demanded food or more wages to buy food. ’Any other people on earth would rise against a Government that had reduced it to such misery‘, Ethel Cooper wrote on 11 February 1917.5 Two months later strikers in her home town of Leipzig did call for political change. But the demands were for reform, not revolution: equal and universal suffrage, the removal of military controls on political discourse, and a peace without annexations.
Elsewhere in Germany the strikes in April were not politicised, or at least not overtly so. In Berlin on the 16th 200,000 workers, half of them women, staged a one-day demonstration to demand food. The newspaper of the Social Democrats, Vorwärts, denied the motivations were political. But the denial in itself carried a message. The Social Democrats had voted for war credits in 1914, and had embraced the idea that support for the state in its time of trial would be the path to political reform after the war was over. But for a party still constitutionally committed to revolution a policy of reform carried penalties. Although the largest single grouping in the Reichstag, its individual membership had fallen from over a million in 1914 to a quarter of a million in 1917. A minority rejected the Burgfrieden, the domestic truce between parties of August 1914, and in April 1917 broke away from the majority Socialists to create an Independent Socialist Party. The new grouping shaped the demands of the Leipzig strikers, which in themselves suggest that the Independent Socialists were not a major threat. They looked back to the original programme of the German Socialists, adopted at Erfurt in 1890, not forward, and they were still ready to support a defensive war. However, they did possess an inner core, the Spartacists, headed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. In 1916, in Switzerland, Luxemburg, under the nom de guerre of Junius, had published a refutation of the notion that the war was defensive for Germany. Its purposes were imperialist and capitalist: ‘The cannon fodder inflated with patriotism and carried off in August and September 1914 now rots in Belgium, in the Vosges, in the Masurian swamps, creating fertile plains of death on which profits can grow’6 She declared that social democracy had failed the working class, and that only international class action could bring peace. Inspired by the events in Russia, she and Liebknecht believed that a mass strike could be the trigger for revolution.
For Bethmann Hollweg, therefore, the message was clear: political reform would keep the majority Socialists tied to the state, would validate their position in the eyes of the working class they aspired to represent, and would divide social and economic grievances from the idea of revolution. Wilhelm Groener, appointed to head the war office, or Kriegsamt, within the Prussian Ministry of War, was committed to a parallel and complementary set of ideas. He was the principal architect of the Auxiliary Service Law, a deal between army, industry and labour on the management of German manpower in the war. For the first time in Germany, the trade unions were given an acknowledged role in the arbitration of disputes. Between 1916 and 1918 trade-union membership, which had been savaged by the consequences of conscription, recovered: that of the metal-workers’ union in upper Silesia increased 154 per cent in 1917 alone.7 But for many German socialists the Auxiliary Service Law was not an important step towards workers’ rights but another compromise which weakened them. Workers were restricted in their ability to move between jobs, while industrialists’ profits were not controlled. Groener wished the army to be the neutral representative of the state, the embodiment in some senses of Walther Rathenau’s corporatist dream, an amalgam of the best of capitalism and collectivism. But many of his military colleagues preferred to align the army more closely with the interests of the industrialists. The war aims programme, which aspired to secure for Germany the iron ore and coalfields of Belgium and of Longwy-Briey in France, was one manifestation of this alliance. Another, in October 1917, was the dismissal of Groener, who tried to control both wages and profits, as labour and industry exploited the Hindenburg programme for their respective advantage.
The peace resolution and the emergence of a centre-left coalition may have weakened the right in parliamentary terms but it had not silenced its effectiveness outside the Reichstag. Here it had powerful allies in Hindenburg and Ludendorff. They, not the centre-left or Bethmann Hollweg, were the beneficiaries of the political crisis the peace resolution generated.
On 6 July 1917 Matthias Erzberger, the leader of the Catholic Centre Party, delivered a speech during the debate on the war credits for the coming year, in which he declared that ‘all our calculations as regards the submarine war are false’, that the idea of defensive war should be resuscitated, and that ‘we must do everything possible to find a way which favours the conclusion of a peace this year’.8 Erzberger thus began the process that concluded with the Reichstag peace resolution. However, his victim was not the Pan-German League and its annexationist war aims, which he specifically mentioned, but the chancellor. Bethmann Hollweg was tired, committed to a policy of unrestricted submarine war in which he did not believe but which Erzberger among others had once advocated. ‘My position does not matter’, he said when he rose to reply on 9 July. ‘I myself am convinced of my own limitations . . . I am considered weak because I seek to end the war. A leading statesman can receive support neither from the Left nor the Right in Germany.’9
But that was precisely the function of the chancellor in the Kaiser’s eyes. Bethmann Hollweg resigned the following day, not because the army wanted him to go but because he could not manage the Reichstag. His policy of what he had called the ‘diagonal’ was no longer sustainable. In the minds of the centre and left the chancellor was now bracketed with the Pan-German League, and in the minds of the right and the army he was a reformer and liberal, insufficiently committed to the idea of a ’German peace‘. The army’s opportunity arose from its ability to strike out on a new diagonal of its own. Colonel Max Bauer, the army’s most adroit intriguer, dined with Erzberger and Gustav Stresemann, leader of the National Liberals, and suggested that the chancellor had failed in his democratic duty by denying the Reichstag committee the opportunity to discuss the issues with the supreme command itself. The notion that Hindenburg and Ludendorff were the people’s representatives was not as absurd as first appearances might suggest. Rathenau told Ludendorff that he was ’exercising an unconscious dictatorship and that, if he were to appeal to his real power-base, he would have the support not only of parliament, but the whole of public opinion.‘10 The rising talents in the war, such as Ludendorff and Groener, were not Junkers but bourgeois, and, although they had a traditional Prussian in Hindenburg at their head, even his authority rested on demagogic populism derived from the victory at Tannenberg.
On 12 July Bauer arranged a meeting between Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s son, and selected representatives of the principal Reichstag parties. Bethmann Hollweg’s fate was sealed and he resigned the next day. When the Reichstag formally adopted the peace resolution on 19 July, it did so not with the Kaiser’s or the Reichstag’s nominee installed as chancellor, but with the army‘s, Georg Michaelis. Political heavyweights were surprised and cynical: ’We have lost a statesman and have secured a functionary in his place‘, said a Social Democrat, Conrad Haussmann.11 But Michaelis was a man for his times, a bureaucrat who was popular because he had run the wheat administration effectively. ’In my opinion, this is the only organization which has completely fulfilled its responsibilities without mismanagement‘, wrote Richard Stumpf, a seaman. ’He is Germany’s first bourgeois chancellor.‘12 Michaelis’s response to the peace resolution was to accept it as ’he understood it‘.
The army’s presence in the chamber as Michaelis spoke was unmistakable, but the ‘silent dictatorship’ was exactly that - silent. The army did not itself govern. Moreover, it was the navy which revealed the limits on military power in German politics. In August 1917 mutinies broke out on the capital ships moored at Wilhelmshaven. The grievances were in part professional. Relations between officers and men were poor, the ships had not put to sea since Jutland, and the crews were bored; those on U-boats, now fully engaged in the fighting, remained quiet. But the sailors also expressed themselves in terms similar to the workers with whom they consorted in their off-duty hours, complaining of war-weariness and poor food. The mutineers had made contact with the Independent Socialists, and Admiral Scheer - like Pétain and Cadorna - was quick to detect an external conspiracy. Two of the mutineers were executed after a summary court martial. Michaelis seized the opportunity to castigate the Independent Socialists in the Reichstag, hoping thereby to drive a wedge between them and the centre-left coalition. He had miscalculated. The Reichstag rallied to the Independent Socialists, and Michaelis fell. His successor was appointed without the army being consulted. Georg von Hertling, a Bavarian Catholic, was no democrat, but he was a member of the Centre Party and was clear on his constitutional responsibilities. He selected a Social Democrat, Friedrich von Payer, as his vice-chancellor and a liberal, Richard Kühlmann, as his foreign secretary. In January 1918 he reminded Hindenburg that the general staff’s role was advisory.13
Hertling’s difficulty was that he was claiming a responsibility which he did not have the tools to exercise. Germany was fighting what Ludendorff in later life called a ‘total war’, but with the administrative structures of a small nineteenth-century state. It had no equivalent of Britain’s Ministry of Munitions; the Prussian Ministry of War did duty as a Reich economics ministry; it never collected its various propaganda agencies into a ministry of information. Therefore the general staff expanded to fill the gaps, and took over functions for which its structures and attitudes - geared to the conduct of war at operational level - were not fitted. By January 1918 2.3 million men had been released from military service for war production. But no checks were imposed to ensure that they were being efficiently used. Daimler, the manufacturer of automobiles and aero engines, employed 1.8 workers per machine in 1914, but 2.4 in 1918. At the beginning of 1917 the firm demanded a 50 per cent price increase after a year in which it had paid out a 35 per cent dividend and written off the entire book value of its plant.14 No body existed to take an overview, to balance competing priorities, or to link the military conduct of the war to its economic and social imperatives.
The principal casualty of the army’s arrogation of power was not the Reichstag but the Kaiser. Increasingly redundant, he went for walks in the woods, played skat, bickered with the Empress, and complained about his own irrelevance. ‘Great indignation with the Kaiser who spends hours supervising the building of a fountain at Homburg, for which a war contractor has raised the money’, wrote Georg von Müller in his diary on 7 August 1916. While his soldiers slogged it out at Verdun and on the Somme, ‘He went for an excursion to Saalburg and Friedrichshof this afternoon and refused to read a report from Hindenburg on the situation on the Eastern Front because “he had no time”’.15
In the people’s eyes, Hindenburg, not the Kaiser, became the supreme warlord. The principal political vehicle for this idea was the Fatherland Party, formally launched on 2 September 1917, the anniversary of Prussia’s defeat of France at Sedan in 1870. The purpose of its founders, Wolfgang Kapp (an advocate of extreme war aims) and Tirpitz (now out of office), was to rekindle the ‘spirit of 1914’ by appealing for national unity in order to achieve a German victory. In reality, its supporters were conservative - schoolteachers, clergy and the professional middle class conspicuous among them. Right-wing nationalism, with its anti-capitalist overtones and its rejection of constitutional reform, was elided with calls for conquest. Its policies were in reality more divisive than unifying, but it could still claim 1.25 million members by 1918.
The army supported the Fatherland Party through its own press agency and through the censorship of the party’s political opponents. Formally speaking, soldiers could not be members, but Ludendorff was very conscious that mechanisms like mail and leave meant they could not be insulated from the effects of war-weariness at home. He tightened postal censorship, and at the end of July set up an organisation for patriotic instruction, to remind the army what it was fighting for. French intelligence reported mutinies on the western front between May and August 1917, a phenomenon which may explain why Ludendorff did not exploit the disturbances in the French army. By September and October morale was very low, particularly on the Ypres sector, with cases of desertion reaching a peak not surpassed until the following August. ‘There must be an end,’ Hans Spiess wrote to his mother from the front on 16 August 1917, ‘even the 30 Years [War] came to an end’. Dispirited soldiers could depress those at home. ‘When you go on leave, leave the muck and melancholy in the trenches’, a leaflet of December 1917 enjoined; ‘bring them a pinch of fresh air from the front and the humour of the front line’.16
A German field post office on the Western Front, March 1918. Mail was both vital to the maintenance of morale and the principal conduit linking front and rear None the less, the German army did not tighten censorship of its post until 1917.
In September 1916 the Prussian war minister ordered all letters to be written exclusively in German. The easy scapegoats in the event of defeat or disobedience were the non-German nationalities. As early as November 1914 there were reports of Poles in the German army surrendering to the French with cries of ‘Catholics! Poles! Friends!’17 In 1915 Danish soldiers were denied leave and had to serve for a year before being given civic rights. But the army’s suspicions focused particularly on those from Alsace-Lorraine. A third of all orders concerning desertion were directed at them, a policy which might become a self-fulfilling prophecy.18 Dominik Richert was in a unit ordered to go from the eastern front to the western at the beginning of 1917. All Alsatians (like Richert himself) and Lorrainers were told that they were to stay behind and be incorporated in other regiments. As they left their barracks on the morning of 2 January, calls of ‘Vive la France!’ and ‘Vive l’Alsace!‘ rippled up and down the column.19
GERMANY’S ALLIES UNDER STRAIN
The nationality issue was even more emotive in the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1914 Czechs were blamed for the initial defeats in Serbia, earning a reputation which their brave conduct on the Italian front could not subsequently slough off. In Romanian units of the Honved, the Hungarian territorial army, ‘A gulf of deadly hatred appeared between the officers and men’, Octavian Tsluanu wrote. ‘The Hungarian officers, mad to think that Roumania had not declared herself for them, vented their rage on our peasants. They knocked them about abominably, and boasted each night of their schemes of punishment.’20 But the most significant tensions were those between Magyars and Austrians. Conrad von Hötzendorff blamed the inadequacy of the army’s budget on Budapest before the war broke out. He was therefore particularly irked when Hungary resisted the authority of the War Surveillance Office in 1914. With parliamentary government in Austria suspended, the focus of open debate and press criticism shifted to Budapest. István Tisza, the Magyar prime minister, had good cause to be anxious: as the Russians fought to break through the Carpathians, Hungary was likely to be the first casualty of the army’s incompetence. In 1916 Romania’s declaration of war widened the gulf yet further, with Hungary blaming the Austro-Germans for Romania’s decision and rightly fearful that chunks of Hungarian territory would be Bucharest’s reward from the Entente.
Food was the most emotive aspect of the problem. Austria-Hungary was predominantly agricultural without being agriculturally self-sufficient. The direct effects of the blockade were not great, but the war shut off the empire’s two principal sources of supplementary food, Russia and Romania (which although still neutral in 1914 imposed an embargo). By 1917 Austria’s own output of wheat had fallen to 47 per cent of its 1913 total, of rye to 43 per cent and of oats to 29 per cent. Hungary’s production also fell, in large part for the same reasons - the loss of labour, fertilisers and horses - although not to the same extent; it was also hit by the conquest of Galicia. It therefore had less to market. In 1912 Hungary had supplied 85 per cent of Austria’s wheat and cattle, but in 1914 Hungary closed its frontier with Austria and ceased to regard its food as a common resource, preferring to sell its surplus to Germany and to the army. By 1917 Austrian imports of cereals and flour from Hungary were 2.5 per cent of their 1913 total.21
Lack of animal fodder led to meat shortages, and by 1917 the most obvious manifestations of the food problem were two or three meatless days a week in big cities. The shortages were not as severe as in Germany, and in some respects Hungary was taking the blame for Austrian maladministration. Throughout the war Austria-Hungary maintained the fiction that its currency, the crown, was not losing its value, despite an increase in circulation of 1,400 per cent. Excessive liquidity meant that money was translated into goods as quickly as possible, so forcing up prices. They doubled every year, and yet wages remained constant until 1917, and had only risen by a maximum of 100 per cent by the war’s end. Thus the problem was less the production of food than the ability to buy it. Hyperinflation encouraged producers to opt out of the cash economy, either hoarding or bartering. Those in the cities, and consequently furthest from the sources of production, were worst hit. The problems of the railways compounded urban food shortages. Suffering from poor maintenance and overstrain, the trains could not deliver to the cities. Austria’s stock of cows fell only 18.4 per cent between 1910 and 1918, yet milk deliveries to Vienna declined 69 per cent.22 Finally, food supply was never brought under a single head. Austria-Hungary aped Rathenau’s war raw-materials agencies, calling them ‘centrals’, but they established them for services as well as goods. The slaughter of an ox involved five centrals, those for leather, meat, bone, fat and procurement. In February 1917 a common food agency was established under General Ottokar Landwehr von Pragenau, but he lacked full executive powers, especially in Hungary.
Kaiser Karl’s young family broke up the stuffiness of the Habsburg court, but the influence exercised over him by his French wife, Zita, gave rise to rumours of treason and betrayal
There was irony in this: Landwehr had been appointed by the Emperor precisely to get round the constitutional trammels of the dual monarchy. Franz Josef died on 21 November 1916, and was succeeded by his great-nephew, Karl. Karl was aged twenty-nine, ‘a sympathetic young man, who did not yet know how to begin what was right for him and who did not particularly seek to diminish his function as the fifth wheel’.23 None the less he assumed the supreme command of the army, and dismissed Conrad von Hötzendorff as chief of the general staff. His antipathy was as much personal as professional: Conrad had fulfilled his pre-war ambition by marrying Gina von Reininghaus and had installed her at headquarters, a bitter affront to a Catholic as devout as the new monarch. Karl hoped to remobilise the peoples of the empire through consensus, but instead gave them the opportunity to vent their differences.
He was crowned King of Hungary, but refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the Austrian constitution, so giving notice that he planned to put in hand the reforms that had been so long postponed. Liberalisation was their hallmark. Press censorship was eased, and the remit of the army in domestic affairs curtailed. However, for some this spelt laxity, not progress: Karl Stürgkh, Austria’s prime minister, was assassinated on 21 October 1916 by Friedrich Adler, son of the socialists’ leader, but Adler was never brought to trial. Stürgkh had opposed the convening of Austria’s parliament, and the combination of his death and Karl’s accession opened the door to its recall. In May 1917, Karl told it that its task was ‘the free national and cultural development of equally privileged peoples’. 24 The empire was being pointed in the direction of federalism, but in conditions where political change would be hard to direct.
Karl’s reforms were also a direct challenge to Hungary. For a brief period Tisza had been able to pose as a liberal prime minister. The bluff had already been called by Mihály Károlyi, who in the summer of 1916 had formed the Party of Independence and 1848. The compromise between Austria and Hungary was due for renewal in 1917, and the aim of the Károlyi party was complete autonomy. Its programme combined domestic reform - a widening of the franchise, and land redistribution - with calls for an investigation into the army and a peace without annexations or indemnities. Károlyi attracted the support of socialists and revolutionaries, and orchestrated major demonstrations in Budapest on 1 May 1917. None the less it was he, rather than Tisza, whom Karl consulted. The prime minister resigned on 23 May at Karl’s request, and was succeeded by Moritz Esterházy, who declared, ‘I desire to work on democratic lines, but naturally democracy in Hungary can only be Hungarian democracy’.25 When, in December 1917, Austria and Hungary brokered a new deal, it was set to last not twenty years, as had been originally intended, but two.
Developments in the Habsburg Empire worried its German ally. The pursuit of political change required conditions of peace, not war. On 3 April Karl and his foreign minister, Ottokar Czernin, visited the Kaiser, ostensibly to complain about the declaration of unrestricted U-boat war, on which their German ally had - with predictable high-handedness - failed to consult them. Their real mission was to press the need for peace. Arz von Straussenburg, Conrad’s successor as chief of the general staff, warned his German hosts that the empire could not last beyond the coming winter. Czernin was more alarmist: ‘I’ll tell you something’, he said to Georg von Müller. ‘Unless the war ends within three months the people will end it without their governments. I can’t have a wager with you because should this happen it will be impossible to pay the debt.’26
Czernin’s aim was to get Germany to accept the need for a negotiated peace rather than court revolution. In strategic terms, if not economic or social, Austria-Hungary’s position was eminently satisfactory: Serbia had been crushed, Romania had been largely overrun, and the fall of the Tsar had put Russia on the back foot. Vienna had no immediate quarrel with Britain or France, both of whom would be satisfied if Germany agreed to the independence of Belgium and the return of Alsace-Lorraine. But that was the rub: Germany, and particularly Hindenburg and Ludendorff, refused to consider terms which did not conform to their idea of a ‘German peace’. Czernin protested his loyalty to Berlin, but peace on Germany’s terms implied Austria-Hungary’s subordination to its overbearing ally for the foreseeable future. Although he probably did not know it, his monarch was already in separate negotiations with Britain and France. Karl’s wife, Zita, was French, and his brother-in-law, Prince Sixte Bourbon-Parma, had served with distinction in the Belgian army, and was acting as an intermediary.
Tensions were also multiplying in Germany’s relations with the Ottoman Empire. Turkey’s value to Germany lay in the threat it could pose to Britain in the Middle East and in its ability to divert Russian troops from the European front to the Caucasus. In achieving the second of these objectives, the Turks lost eastern Anatolia. The Russians captured Erzurum by 15 February 1916 and reached Trabzon on the Black Sea coast on 18 April. With the British defeated at Gallipoli and Kut, the Turks were able to concentrate twenty-six of their fifty-two divisions on the Caucasus front by the summer of 1916. But as combat casualties (which peaked in the first two years of the war) fell, losses through desertion and disease rose. In September 1916, Enver Pasha restructured the army in the light of its real strength rather than its paper establishment: ‘in general the old battalions became companies, the regiments battalions, the divisions regiments, the corps divisions’.27 Despite this, Enver was able to be supportive when he visited the newly appointed Hindenburg: ‘The decision of the war as a whole lies in Europe,’ he declared on 11 September 1916, ‘and I make all my forces available for the battle there.’28
He did not mean quite what he said. Four Turkish divisions were already deployed in Romania, a campaign whose success could clearly jeopardise the Russian position in the Caucasus, but when Ludendorff asked him for three more he prevaricated. The success of the Russians in pulling Turkish divisions to the north of the Ottoman Empire had reopened the British route to Baghdad. The city fell on 11 March 1917. This was no side-show for the Germans: Ludendorff had begun prodding Enver about measures for Baghdad’s defence long before the Ottoman minister of war woke up to the threat. They immediately agreed to release a German commander for the theatre, none other than the former chief of the general staff, Falkenhayn, as well as 18,000 German and Austrian troops.
The British constructed a water pipeline and railway from Egypt across the Sinai desert, but in March 1917 were checked on Palestine’s southern border at Gaza. Horse artillery heads off into no man’s land near Shellal (today En HaShelosha) in August
Falkenhayn planned an offensive campaign, codenamed ‘Yilderim’ (lightning), to recapture Baghdad. But when he arrived in the Middle East in May, it became clear that the British in Egypt were pushing into the Sinai desert, and might well advance into Palestine in the autumn. In that event the Turks, conscious of the strengths and weaknesses of their own army, and of the limits imposed by logistical considerations, favoured fighting a defensive battle on the line between Gaza and Beersheba. Falkenhayn feared that the Central Powers’ forces would therefore be divided over two fronts and that a British breakthrough into Palestine would threaten his lines of communication in Iraq. He demanded that all the forces in the two theatres be combined under his command, creating what was essentially a German headquarters which not only marginalised the Turks but also was too far to the rear, in Aleppo. He proposed to strike first against the British in Sinai before turning back to Mesopotamia. His high-handed manner affronted the Turks, and it also antagonised Germans, who had been in the region much longer than he. Falkenhayn saw them as ’Turkified‘; they saw him as ’commanding the Turkish army in the desert as one would lead a German army in civilised Europe‘.29
Falkenhayn was not the only new commander in the Middle East with ideas derived from the war in Europe. Edmund Allenby, fresh from leading the British 3rd Army in the battle of Arras and the capture of Vimy Ridge, arrived to take over the British command in Egypt in June 1917. A cavalryman, ‘he looks the sort of man whose hopes rapidly crystalise into a determination to carry all before it’.30 In London Robertson supported the idea of an attack on the Gaza-Beersheba line, realising that it would take pressure off Baghdad.
The Turks established a reputation for themselves as fierce fighters in defensive battles Their lines around Gaza were strengthened in 1916 and 1917.
Here was no purblind westerner: Mesopotamia, Robertson declared on 1 August 1917, was not a ‘side-show because as long as we keep up a good show there India and Persia will be more or less all right’.31 Climatic considerations meant that the Palestine front would open up as that in France and Flanders closed down. When the battle of Gaza began on 27 October, the British mounted the war’s heaviest artillery attack outside Europe, with as many heavy guns per yard of front as in the battle of the Somme. Furthermore, aerial supremacy meant that their fire was better directed and coordinated.
But while the guns and infantry pinned the Turks frontally, inland and to the east ‘there grew a muttering that spread for miles - the pounding of ten thousand hooves’. This was a campaign in which cavalry still had a role to play: ‘though most of us laughed when the first shells screamed towards us, other men smoked as we broke into a thundering canter holding back in the saddles to prevent the horses from breaking into a mad gallop’. Beersheba, with its water supply, was captured on 31 October. ‘Men are remarking’, noted one exultant trooper of the Australian Light Horse, ‘how the Turk fights till the very last charge, until the pounding hooves are upon him, then he drops his rifle and runs screaming; while the Austrian artillerymen and German machine-gun teams often fight with their guns until they are bayoneted.’32 Unable to hold the line, Falkenhayn pulled back to the hills north of Jerusalem, resting his right flank on Jaffa. In February 1918 he was recalled to Germany, but not before he had intervened to prevent the resettlement of the Jews; they were reckoned to be spying, but neither the Germans nor Talât, elevated to become Ottoman Grand Vizier in February 1917, wanted a repeat of the Armenian massacres.
Allenby’s forces entered Jerusalem on 9 December, and prepared for the expected Turkish counterattack. On his right flank, across the River Jordan, he had the support of Arabs under the command of Feisal, son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca. The British were as ready as the Germans to use revolution as an instrument of war. The Government of India had pinned many of their initial hopes for the campaign in Mesopotamia on the possibility of Arab support. In reality, many Arabs remained loyal to the Turks, while others observed a form of neutrality, eyeing each other and ready to loot either army; as the British advanced up the Tigris in 1915-16, the rule was ‘upstream of us hostile, downstream friendly’.33 But to the west, in September 1914, before war with Turkey had even begun, Kitchener initiated contacts with Sherif Hussein. Initially Britain offered the Caliphate, which it understood in spiritual rather than temporal terms, but in October 1915 the high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, also promised Arab independence. The India Office was appalled, because it hoped to annex Iraq for itself. Moreover, although the high commissioner had entered a caveat in relation to French interests in the region, his proposal was at odds with a deal struck in December 1915 between Mark Sykes and François Picot of France. Picot, who represented a small group determined to secure ‘greater Syria’ for France, acted on his own initiative. Sykes responded by setting British desiderata higher in order to off-set French influence in the region. As a result he neglected Arab nationalism. The two divided all Arabia into two spheres of influence, albeit one in which suzerainty would be indirect rather than direct. Sykes was concerned with the post-war settlement; McMahon’s focus was on getting the Arabs into the war. Hussein remained undecided until June 1916. When he did at last declare his hand for revolt, he gave the Turks a scapegoat for defeat not unlike the subject nationalities exploited by the Germans and Austro-Hungarians.
The Foreign Office set up an Arab Bureau, staffed by such luminaries as the self-publicising T. E. Lawrence and the redoubtable explorer Gertrude Bell, in Cairo to liaise with Hussein and his sons. Its self-appointed role was to undo the Sykes-Picot agreement and to wrong-foot the India Office by making ‘an efficient Arab empire’. In 1918, Lawrence was to claim that, ‘The phrase “Arab Movement” was invented in Cairo as a common denomination for all the vague discontent against Turkey’.34 The strength of the Arab forces in the field oscillated wildly, and the difficulty in military terms was holding the tribesmen together in any coherent body, especially as the Palestine campaign moved north away from their home territories. Since 1915 Syria had been ravaged by famine. Its coastal areas were victims of the allied blockade, and the problems were exacerbated by poor Ottoman administration, bad harvests and speculation. By 1918 the death toll may have reached half a million, and ‘food was the commodity of political allegiance’.35 As the Australian Light Horse advanced in the wake of the shattered Turkish army, ‘swarms of Arabs, men, women and children, staggering under loads of loot’ pillaged its abandoned baggage. ’Numbers of these Arab cut-throats carried sacks of little flat loaves of brown Turkish bread, looted from the still warm ovens.‘36 Lawrence’s success as a guerrilla leader lay in his ability to harness plunder for the purposes of the war.
The allies’ advance was amplified by the dissolution of the apparatus of the Ottoman state, at least in the southern half of the empire. Paper currency, if negotiable at all, was traded at eight to ten times its face value in Syria and Mesopotamia. For most Arabs, only gold was acceptable, and as the British disbursed it so they secured support. Even in Constantinople the cash economy collapsed. The price of bread rose fifty-fold between 1914 and 1918, and by February 1918 the cost of living had risen 1,970 per cent since the war began. An inadequate internal transport system had left Constantinople dependent on imported food even in peacetime. In war the blockade increased the city’s reliance on the hinterland, but its production was falling. Anatolia had been sucked dry of its principal resource, men. Total Turkish deaths in the war may have risen as high as 2.5 million, more than three times those of Britain, and in some villages only 10-20 per cent of those of military age returned. Agricultural production depended in large part on the enormous number of deserters, perhaps as many as half a million, who roamed the interior.37 Turkey was bitterly disappointed to be excluded by its allies from the proceeds of Romania’s surrender in May 1918.
THE ‘BREAD’ PEACE
But if the treaty of Bucharest was a source of frustration for the Turks, that of Brest-Litovsk was an opportunity. The Caucasian front had been quiet since the overthrow of the Tsar, and a local armistice was brokered at Erzincan on 18 December 1917. In the negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, Richard Kühlmann was keen to make the German army’s lust for eastern conquests look like national self-determination, principally to appease the centre-left bloc in the Reichstag. Russia’s evacuation of eastern Anatolia and Turkey’s claim to its pre-1878 frontiers could be rendered compatible with such notions. But in the Baltic states and Poland independence was a fig-leaf for German domination. On 9 February Trotsky walked out of the negotiations, declaring ‘no peace, no war’, rather than accept terms so humiliating. Three days later, the armies of the Central Powers crossed the armistice line. ‘It is the most comical war I have ever known’, the German chief of staff in the east, Major-General Max Hoffmann, wrote in his diary. ‘We put a handful of infantrymen with machine guns and one gun on a train and push them off to the next station; they take it, make prisoners of the Bolsheviks, pick up a few more troops, and go on.’38 To the south, the Ottoman army re-entered Trabzon on 17 February 1918 and Erzurum on 12 March. On 3 March, when the Russians signed the treaty, they accepted that Kars, Ardahan and Batum would be restored to Turkey, and acknowledged the independence of Transcaucasia. By now, however, the Turks said they were advancing not to check Bolshevism but to protect Muslims under attack from Armenians. In oil-rich Baku Muslims clashed with Bolsheviks and Christians. While Turkish troops abandoned the southern half of the Ottoman Empire, falling back on Damascus and Mosul, in the northern half the pan-Turk ambitions that had led Enver to Sarikamish over three years before revived. ‘You see that destiny draws Turkey from the West to the East’, Vehib, the army commander in the Caucasus, explained to the Armenians. ‘We left the Balkans, we are also leaving Africa, but we must extend toward the East. Our blood, our religion, our language is there. And this has an irresistible magnetism. Our brothers are in Baku, Daghestan, Turkestan, and Azerbaijan.’39
For Austria-Hungary, too, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk promised to reinvigorate flagging spirits. Czernin was caught between the wishes of Karl, who favoured a peace without annexations, and the pressure that Ludendorff was putting on his German counterpart, Kühlmann. The key issue for Vienna was not territory but food, and the settlement that mattered was therefore that with Ukraine, rather than that with Russia. On 15 January Czernin heard from the governor of Bohemia that food shortages threatened imminent disaster: ‘we receive only small quantities from Hungary, thus far we have got 10,000 wagons of maize from Romania, and so there are at least 30,000 wagons of corn outstanding, without which we must simply be ruined.... In a few weeks our war industry, our transport network will come to a standstill, the supply of the army will become impossible, [and] they must collapse, and this catastrophe must lead to the collapse of Austria and as a result to that of Hungary.’40
Flour rations in Austria had been cut on the previous day. Workers at the Daimler factory in Wiener Neustadt immediately protested. By 17 January 200,000 were on strike in Vienna, and by the 19th, according to the reports received by Josef Redlich, ‘the strike has become universal, and all mines in Ostrau, Brno, Pilsen, Prague and in Steiermark are at a standstill.... In Budapest, there is a general strike, and the trams are not running. Machine-guns have been erected everywhere.’41 Trotsky was sufficiently heartened to hope that the spread of the Bolshevik revolution would usurp the Brest-Litovsk negotiations. ‘In Russia’, one Austrian poster declared, ‘the land has been divided among the people, and factories and pits have been taken into collective ownership.’42 Shop councils were elected on the lines of Soviets, and they stressed that the Central Powers’ demands should not stand in the way of peace with the Bolsheviks. But the Social Democrats followed the crowd rather than led it; they joined the demonstrations in order not to lose credibility with the workers, and to moderate not foment their demands. The immediate government response was conciliatory: Czernin told the Social Democrats that peace with Russia was imminent and that food would come from Poland and Ukraine. The protests had begun in the core areas of the empire; they were not the work of the ‘subject nationalities’ seeking its disintegration. By the time the navy mutinied at Cattaro on the Adriatic coast at the beginning of February, order had returned around Vienna.
German troops maintained order in Ukraine, establishing their authority along the axes of the railway lines.
The Ukraine did not deliver as much as expected. The new government, the Rada, challenged by the Bolsheviks, could not impose its authority on the country, and was toppled by a counter-revolution at the end of April. Order depended on German and Austrian bayonets. Wilhelm Groener, now a corps commander in Kiev, reported to Ludendorff on 23 March: ‘The administrative structure is in total disorder, completely incompetent and in no way ready for quick results. Austria-Hungary sees the situation in eminently practical terms; it would be in our interests to treat the Ukrainian government as a “cover”, and for us to do the rest ourselves’.43 All told, about 1.5 million soldiers, albeit older and less fit than those in the west, remained on the eastern front in 1918. They ate a great deal of the food that they were trying to procure for their civilian populations. Moreover, the root cause of food shortages in the Habsburg Empire, and a contributory factor in Germany itself, was transport. Food bound for Austria-Hungary had to be shipped across the Black Sea and up the Danube or brought across war-ravaged Galicia. For Germany, bringing grain from the Ukraine, and moving troops to and from an eastern front which refused to be closed down even after Brest-Litovsk was signed, put strains on a railway network already operating way beyond its normal territorial range and cursed with worn-out locomotives, inadequate maintenance and insufficient fuel. The Germans occupied the Donets basin by the end of April, but it produced only 5 million tons of coal in the first half of 1918: they had to send 80,000 tons a month from Germany to keep the trains operational.44 All four Central Powers imported only 113,421 tons of food from Ukraine in 1918: as Czernin acknowledged, ‘the hopes, which the settlement at Brest-Litovsk had universally raised, were not remotely fulfilled.’45
After the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany acknowledged the nominal independence of the Baltic states, but aimed to exercise indirect control Civil war enabled German troops to intervene in Finland in April 1918 Red Guards are rounded up in Helsinki.
In Germany the Vienna strikes, especially when they seemed to achieve their objectives with so much ease, inspired the workers to similar demonstrations. On 28 January 100,000 struck in Berlin, and within days 400,000 were out, with support in many major cities across Germany, including Dusseldorf, Kiel, Hamburg and Cologne. One estimate reckoned that about 4 million took to the streets. The leaders were radical shop stewards alienated from the official trade unions, but in most cases their objectives were still not revolutionary. As in Austria-Hungary, the majority Socialists responded to the initiative of the workers rather than prompted it. But in Germany the official reaction was very different. ‘My old friend, the Commandant of Berlin, General Kessel’, Princess Blücher noted, ‘is doing his best to stir up the troubled waters by stamping with his heavy foot and rattling with his iron fist.’46 The army believed that the workers were encouraging the Russians’ intransigence at the negotiating table. On 31 January a state of siege was declared, and the ringleaders were rounded up and court-martialled. A hundred and fifty of them were imprisoned, and up to 50,000 were put into uniform. In the army they joined prisoners of war released from Russia and units which had been exposed to the two-way flow of fraternisation on the eastern front. Trains which carried them westwards bore slogans like ‘Cannon fodder for Flanders’.
GERMANY’S 1918 OFFENSIVES
The soldiers at the front showed little sympathy for those they called the ‘rowdies’. ‘We have to thank these Berlin whelps for lengthening the war by at least half a year’, wrote one.47 So far morale at the front remained distinct from feeling at home. But the army was breaking down the division by drafting all the men it could get. For the first time since February 1916, it was planning a major offensive on the western front. Success on the battlefield would fulfil a domestic objective: like Tannenberg it would give the military popular legitimacy. Many senior army officers were of the view that it was too late, that the German army could mount only limited offensives. General Hoffmann reckoned that Germany should seek a compromise peace without annexations, oth-ers that it should roll up like a hedgehog, and fight a defensive battle on shortened lines. But the collapse of Russia permitted Germany to shift forty-four divisions to the west between 1 November 1917 and 21 March 1918.48 ‘Our overall position’, Ludendorff told a conference of army commanders on 11 November 1917, ‘requires the earliest possible blow, if possible at the end of February, or the beginning of March, before the Americans can throw strong forces into the scales.’49
The Mediterranean proved a particularly happy hunting ground for U-boats based close by in the Adriatic. The French ship Sontay en route from Marseille to Salonika, sank in five minutes on 16 April 1917. Of the 425 passengers, 380 were rescued
That was about as far as strategic logic went. German hopes for 1917 had been pinned on the U-boat offensive. Holtzendorff had calculated that, if Germany could sink 600,000 tons of British shipping a month for five months, Britain would have to make peace. The navy delivered: it sank 860,334 tons in April, and exceeded its target in May and June. Given that it had only about thirty submarines on station at any one time, that was a remarkable achievement: before the war it was thought 222 would be needed for an effective blockade of Britain.50 But when Erzberger attacked the chancellor in July, he did so on the basis that the U-boat offensive had failed. British countermeasures were only part of the reason. By grouping merchantmen in convoys the Royal Navy made the best use of its destroyers, the bulk of which had hitherto been committed to escorting the Grand Fleet; this was also where the contribution of the United States Navy came in. Destroyers, unlike most merchant vessels, carried wirelesses, and thus ensured that the most up-to-date signals intelligence from Room 40 was available in routing convoys away from U-boats. However, the essential point was that Holtzendorff had miscalculated. He had assumed that neutral tonnage would be frightened off the seas. It was not. Freight rates and London’s control of the insurance market saw to that. Instead, less was imported into border neutrals for re-export to the Central Powers. In this respect the Germans shot themselves in the foot: the U-boat campaign tightened the allied blockade. Moreover, Britain’s own food supplies were more elastic than Holtzendorff had imagined. Britain imported about 64 per cent of its food in 1914, but it had spare pasture which it could bring into cultivation. Output was promoted rather than retarded, especially since rationing, when it was eventually introduced, was exercised at the point of sale, not at the point of production. Wheat yields rose 40 per cent between 1914 and 1918, and those of most other foodstuffs were at least constant.51 Imports emphasised commodities like grain which were more efficient than livestock in the ratio of weight to calorific value. Mortality rates among the working class declined, as diets became healthier and rationing guaranteed a minimum subsistence for the underprivileged.52 By the time Britain moved to full-scale rationing, in 1918, the worst of the danger to its trade was over, and the benefits were largely psychological. With a minimal black market, state controls on food supply promoted social solidarity - rather than, as in Germany, undermining it. ‘Look well at the loaf on your breakfast table and treat it as if it were real gold,’ declared Kennedy Jones, director-general of food economy, in a speech in Edinburgh in May 1917, ‘because the British loaf is going to beat the German.’53
The German supreme command at Spa, in Belgium, June 1918 The Kaiser is flanked by Hindenburg to the left and Ludendorff to the right
By June 1917 the German navy was ordering new submarines for 1919, effectively acknowledging that Holtzendorff’s assumptions had already been proven wrong. However, the total number of vessels available at any one time fell thereafter. It was symptomatic of the army’s approach to the direction of the war that neither materials nor men were released for an even bigger construction programme. Germany did not have the resources or the planning mechanisms to enable it to mount a major effort by land and sea simultaneously. In 1916 the land offensive in the west had not been accompanied by a U-boat campaign; in 1917, the year of the U-boat, there was no major offensive in France; and in 1918 the land option was pursued to the detriment of the naval. In January 1918 Hindenburg told the Kaiser that ‘We have to defeat the Western Powers in order to secure the political and economic position in the world that we need’.54 But even if the Germans got to Paris and Calais, as some optimists hoped, their victory would not knock out either Britain or the United States. Czernin believed that Britain might be persuaded to negotiate before the American presence was felt, so that it retained the upper hand in world politics, but that in turn implied a German readiness to compromise on Belgium and Alsace-Lorraine. Neither Hindenburg nor Ludendorff would do so, especially when they and others were increasingly thinking in terms of the ‘Second Punic War’. If the current world war did not secure the full package of German war aims, it would have to be followed by another. In that case it would be even more important to conclude this one with gains which would enable the next to be fought to a victorious conclusion.
Planning at the operational level in the winter of 1917-18 was as confused as at that of overall strategy. If the aim was to knock out France, Verdun was still the sector that could be treated in isolation. But the battle of 1916 carried its own lesson: the French army would not easily give in. The British army was seen as a softer nut, less adroit and less committed to holding ground which was not its own. Therefore, the Army Group commanded by Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria favoured an attack in Flanders, directed due west, and designed to cut off the British in the Ypres salient. But the boggy ground militated against an attack early in the year, and so the balance swung to objectives further south. The sector chosen, from Arras south to St Quentin, covered the old Somme battlefield, whose devastated terrain would slow the German advance just at the point where it might hope to achieve breakthrough. Moreover, the main thrust of the attack, mounted by the 2nd and 17th Armies, would have to go first to the south-west, to clear the salient at Cambrai, and then re-orientate itself in mid-battle to go north-west towards Arras and Vimy. To their south, the 18th Army, originally given the task of protecting their left flank, had the limits on its objectives removed and so was encouraged to push south if it could. There was a distinct possibility that the Germans’ effort would dissipate itself in divergent directions. Germany had sufficient resources for one major offensive, but seemed to be committing itself to a series of indecisive engagements. Crown Prince Rupprecht was not happy. This was the first offensive in the west that Hindenburg and Ludendorff had mounted, and he believed that they underestimated the difficulties. When, on 21 January 1918, he pointed out that the attack did ‘not lead in any favourable operational direction’, Ludendorff replied: ‘In Russia we have always set ourselves a close objective and then seen how things develop’. Rupprecht responded with two observations: first, that tactical success could not be an end in itself but had to have an operational foundation, and, second, that fighting the Russians was not the same thing as taking on the British or French.55
German infantry enter a French village in 1918. The officer on the right is adjusting his map case, and looking to his bugler, still necessary for communications in the field. Unlike many German units, this one has sufficient transport.
Rupprecht was marginalised. The German principle of delegating command forward, which applied at the forward edge of the battlefield, was not applied at the level of higher command. Ludendorff used three armies for the offensive, code-named ‘Michael’, and divided them over two army groups, so that decisions had to work their way up the command chain, not down it. Only he could resolve disputes, and it was clear that his own conceptual grasp was limited. ‘Ludendorff is a man of absolute determination,’ Rupprecht noted, ‘but determination alone is not enough, if it is not combined with clear-headed intelligence.’56
Ludendorff had decided that in the circumstances of trench warfare tactics were all. If a breakthrough could be effected, then strategy could follow. A sequence of battles in the second half of 1917, the capture of Riga, the breakthrough at Caporetto, and a counterattack at Cambrai, did indeed suggest that the Germans had cracked the conundrums of trench warfare. In January 1918 they promulgated a new manual, the ‘attack in position warfare’. This was not as fresh in its thinking as is sometimes claimed. Its immediate origins lay in the manner in which the Germans had conducted their defensive battles of 1917, on the Chemin des Dames and at Ypres. By adopting defence in depth, with the front line only thinly held and the main position to the rear, the Germans had drawn the enemy attack away from its own artillery support, and been able to stress the counterattack even in defensive battles. They had also delegated command forward, to ensure that the response to any allied gains was immediate, and to enable lost ground to be recaptured before it had been consolidated. But the roots of the tactics of 1918 went even further back: to 1915, and Willy Rohr’s first storm-troops. By 1918 squads or groups of seven to ten storm-troopers were trained to bypass strong points, maintaining the momentum of the advance by seeking soft spots. Supporting formations would mop up.
The other key to reintegrating fire and movement was the artillery, and here the principal innovator on the German side was a lieutenant-colonel who had retired before the war’s outbreak and had still not been formally restored to the active list, Georg Bruchmüller. The bombardment on 21 March 1918 lasted only five hours, its aim being to stun and suppress, not to destroy and - above all - not to forfeit surprise. Its principal target was less the defensive positions of the enemy’s infantry than his artillery batteries. Once armies had learnt countermeasures, gas was not a big killer in the First World War. However, gas shells meant that it could be used with precision. Bruchmüller fired tear-gas shells at the same time as phosgene, forcing enemy gun crews to take off their gas masks, to relieve the irritation to their eyes, and so expose their lungs. The sophisticated use of artillery meant that the battle, which had become linear because of the trenches, was also fought in depth. Effective counter-battery work enabled the German infantry to assemble without itself coming under fire. At 9.40 a.m. storm-troopers clambered out of their trenches, and crossed no man’s land in groups rather than waves, staying close to the rolling barrage that preceded them.
Ludendorff’s problem at the tactical level was less in the theory and more in the practice. He reckoned standards had sunk so low that the army was little better than a militia. In the winter of 1917-18 a total of fifty-six divisions were brought out of the line for training in the attack. But the real emphasis was laid less on the skills of the unit and more on the morale of the individual. The advent of new technology to the battlefield, the battle of matériel, had increased the strains to which the soldier was exposed. In seeking to motivate him the Germans returned to the principles of 1914: ‘the troops must have dash if an assault is to be successful’.57 The army was divided into mobile, attack and trench divisions, the first of these being given better rations and expected to lead the attack. Morale, which had slumped in late October 1917, did rise in the lead-up to the offensives in the west. ‘Everywhere men are working feverishly’, one soldier wrote home on 21 March, ‘and the picture on the roads is as excited as in the first months of the war.’58 But the enthusiasm was conditional: it assumed that the offensive would end the war. Going forward seemed to be the shortest and quickest way home.
The principal blow struck the British 5th Army, under General Sir Hubert Gough, astride the Somme. This was the most thinly defended of all British sectors of the line. It had been occupied only after the German retreat to the Hindenburg line a year before, and much of it had been held by the French until only a few weeks previously. Its defensive positions, although marked out, had not been fully prepared. Both Haig and Pétain knew that an attack was imminent but had not been able to decide where the main blow would fall. The fact that the Germans took so long to make up their minds helped the deception, as did raids and artillery preparations along the length of the front. But the biggest surprise was tactical. The British had underestimated the impact of the initial German assault. The latter was helped by the weather. Low-lying fog enabled the storm-troopers to get between the machine-gun nests in the British forward line. ‘We honestly could not see each other, it was that thick with the German guns and the fog’, recalled Corporal Ted Gale. British casualties on the first day were 38,512, of whom as many as 21,000 were captured. Gale was one of them: ‘Jerry had broken through on right and left of us. This was a mopping-up party coming. They’d never attempted a frontal attack.’59
Panic spread down the command chain, as well as up. The Germans did not get as far on the first day as they hoped. But British corps commanders, unable to see what was happening, overreacted. ‘As soon as telegraphic & telephone communications with Brigades ceased to exist, Divisional Headquarters in many cases became paralysed,’ one staff officer recalled. ‘They had become so welded to a set piece type of warfare, that, when open warfare occurred, they failed to appreciate the situation, and were unable to function independent of a fixed headquarters.’60 Gough’s own orders created confusion as to whether the second line was to be held or not. The result was that the Germans’ gains on the second and third days were amplified as the British fell back. On the 23rd even the cautious Crown Prince Rupprecht was prompted to conclude that ‘The progress of our offensive is so quick, that one cannot follow it with a pen’.61
Territorially the attacks of late March 1918 produced the most significant advances in the west since 1914. They reached almost forty miles, and threatened the vital railway junction of Amiens. But they followed the line of least enemy resistance. Consequently, the German advances were greatest to the south, where they had less strategic effect. To the north, the British 3rd Army (under General Sir Julian Byng) held its positions around the crucial Vimy Ridge. If the aim was to swing north, this was not where the Germans were going. Moreover, the Germans could not keep up with their own success. Deprived of horses, they lacked cavalry to exploit and transport to bring up artillery and supplies. German units in the front line were not relieved, but were expected to sustain the momentum of the advance. The best were killed, and those who survived stopped to plunder and loot: ‘we are already in the English rest areas’, Rudolph Binding wrote as his unit approached Albert on 27 March, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’.62
German field artillery in action in the March 1918 offensive
The ‘Michael’ offensive was formally closed down on 5 April. Ludendorff launched four more. On 9 April, in ’Georgette‘, he struck in Flanders, a far more sensible location if his strategic purpose was to roll the British up against the Channel ports. But by the same token the British defences here were better prepared and more dogged. When ’Georgette’ was closed down, the greatest advance was twelve miles. Ludendorff now switched his attention to the Aisne and the French. Pétain had always feared he would, and so had urged the French to thin out their first defensive line and adopt defence in depth. But his army commanders could not bring themselves wantonly to lose more French territory, and the defences proved brittle when hit by the Germans in Operation ‘Blücher’ on 27 May 1918. Some unfortunate British divisions, taken out of the line to the north in the hope of a rest on a quiet sector, found themselves once again in the teeth of a German attack. The Chemin des Dames offensive buckled the French 7th Army, and reached Château-Thierry on the Marne, fifty-six miles from Paris. What was conceived of as a limited offensive to push the French away from the British now assumed its own importance. Paris itself came under fire from Germany artillery, and the panic in the civil population reproduced that of 1914. Ludendorff therefore renewed the attack against the French on 9 June, between Noyon and Montdidier, in Operation ’Gneisenau‘. Gains were limited, and the French, supported by the Americans, counterattacked at Chateau-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Ludendorff’s last offensive, in Champagne on 15 July, hit French units which had now mastered the defensive battle, and got nowhere.
In mid-July 1918 the German Empire stood at its greatest ever extent. It had pushed on Paris in the west; in the east it held the Ukraine; the Baltic states were under its control; in the Caucasus, the Russian collapse had reopened the route to Baku; and in Italy its Austrian ally had attacked on the Piave in June. For some civilians at home the army seemed poised to deliver the victory that would resolve all their domestic problems. But this time the soldiers knew that they had shot their bolt. The effort to mount the offensives had withdrawn too many troops from other fronts, threatening them with destabilisation. The attacks themselves had created great salients on the western front without achieving a breakthrough. On 20 March, the German army in the west held a front of 390 km; by 25 June 1918 that front extended 510 km. In the interim the army had lost over 800,000 men, with a disproportionate share borne by crack troops.63 During the summer the first wave of the influenza epidemic that was to ravage Europe in 1918-19 hit the German army in the west. At home munitions production was throttled back for lack of men to use its output in the field. The German historian Gerhard Ritter, who was then a young officer serving at the front, called the offensives ‘a crushing disappointment. Once again war’s end had receded into the distant future, once again hecatombs had done no more than haplessly lengthen the front; and how could what had not been achieved in the first great blow, struck with every resource, full surprise, and tremendous artillery barrages, now be won with far weaker forces, consisting largely of decimated and exhausted divisions?’64
Despite being engaged in the most desperate fighting on the western front in a campaign which everybody else saw as Germany’s last gasp, Ludendorff was still engaging in Napoleonic fantasies. On 21 May 1918, he wrote to Hans von Seeckt, now chief of staff on the Caucasian front: ‘There is the hope that we will yet succeed in forcing France to the ground this year. But even if we are victorious in France, it is still in no way certain that we can force the English to a peace acceptable to us, if we are not able to threaten their most sensitive spot, in India. Therefore, we must now prepare ourselves as this necessity approaches.’ 65 In June and July he planned operations for the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, largely using Turkish forces as though they were capable of such grandiose objectives and as though they were willing to fulfil Germany’s objectives rather than their own. He had lost all grasp of strategic reality. The Turks were no longer willing to do Germany’s bidding. Hindenburg asked Enver Pasha to withdraw the Ottoman 3rd Army from any points beyond the frontiers set by Brest-Litovsk, and concentrate against the British in Persia and Mesopotomia. Enver refused. He was bent not only on supporting the Muslim peoples of the north Caucasus but also in getting the oil of Baku. So were the Germans, but for themselves. Halil Pasha, the army group commander in the Caucasus, declared at the end of June that, ‘If necessary I would not hold back from waging war on the Germans’.66
The alliance of the Central Powers was coming apart. The Germans had created a supreme military command in September 1916. On the suggestion of Enver, the Kaiser had been nominated as commander-in-chief, and the German general staff was installed as the supreme command’s advisory body. ‘In other words’, as August von Cramon shrewdly observed, ‘there would be a supreme council of war, but not a supreme command.’67 Moreover, the inadequacies of Germany’s own arrangements were extended to the alliance as a whole: the remit of the ‘supreme war command’ embraced only military matters narrowly defined, and in the circumstances of ’total war’ that was clearly insufficient.
Enver had proposed the arrangement to obviate the tensions between Germany and Austria-Hungary. But it had not. The biggest alliance pressure on Austria-Hungary was fear. For Czernin, the rumours that it wanted peace forced it to disprove them by showing itself loyal, but in April 1918 the French published the Sixte negotiations of the previous year. Czernin felt that he had been betrayed by Karl, and resigned. In the eyes of the Entente his actions confirmed that the alliance between Austria-Hungary and Germany would be broken only by its complete defeat. At one level the Entente was right. Some Austrians, observing the impending disintegration of the empire, looked to Germany to hold it together - or, more realistically, to incorporate the German element within a greater Germany. The Germans themselves seized the moment to tie the bonds tighter in a meeting of the two emperors on 12 May. The reality, however, was that Austria-Hungary was caught in a situation where nothing added up any more. The army was divided against itself, with the chief of the general staff wanting every available man at the front, while the Ministry of War needed seven divisions at home to maintain order. General Landwehr, the Austrian food supremo in Vienna, seized Ukrainian grain bound for Germany as it was transported up the Danube. Food might bring domestic order, but the Germans’ quid pro quo for more grain was six divisions for the western front. Vienna agreed to provide three. Austria-Hungary was truly shackled to Germany, but by the same token Germany was itself now too weak to survive without its ally.