The Great War in review
In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of “The Great War” in 2014, I read a slew of books seeking the answer to the basic question: How could Europe, having enjoyed a long period of peace and prosperity under a seemingly stable system of alliances and treaties, initiated at the Congress of Vienna in 1814, ruled (with the exception of France) by a group of monarchs who were blood-relatives, allow itself to slip precipitously into the most horrible conflagration it had yet experienced? A conflagration whose consequences wouldn’t really be worked out until another World War was fought or, arguably, even until the fall of the Berlin wall and communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989-1991. I read (in chronological order): To End All Wars, by Adam Hochschild, The Sleepwalkers, by Christopher Clark, The Great War for Peace, by William Mulligan, The July Crisis by Thomas Otte, and Serbia in the Great War by Radojevic and Dimic. Why these books? Well, the first was given to me by my daughter Emily for Christmas two years ago. Reading it left me extremely unsatisfied with the author’s explanation for the war’s origins, which led me to the next three, based on favorable published reviews. The fifth was a gift from a Serbian colleague who advised that I needed the Serbian point of view to balance the “Western” perspectives in the other books.
While all authors agree that the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Duke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalist-anarchist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo served as the catalyst for the war, they also all agree that the Great War was not an inevitable consequence of this act and their explanations for what happened next are widely divergent. I’ll start with what I thought was the weakest of the lot, then move on to those that I found progressively more interesting and plausible.
To End All Wars
The greatest virtue of Adam Hochschild’s book was that it left me so unsatisfied with regards to his portrayal of the reasons for the “War to End All Wars” that it drove me to read all of the other books reviewed herein. He portrays all European leaders as a bunch of automatons (much more like sleepwalkers than in Clark’s eponymous book) genetically and culturally programmed with a fatal mix of rampant machismo, warmongering imperialism and chauvinist nationalism, looking for a pretext for a war. All it took was the Sarajevo tragedy to let loose their worst instincts. He quotes many as glorying in the cathartic and purifying aspects of a good war for a civilization gone soft, etc. The only good guys and gals in his book are a smattering of farsighted peace-loving socialists, feminists and labor-union activists (Jure, Arien, the Parkhursts) who opposed the war, tried to warn the world, but failed; and the rest is history. One good point he makes is that WWI was so deadly because it was fought with modern technological innovations (barbed wire, the machine gun, aircraft, poison gas and, finally the decisive weapon: the tank) but using antiquated tactics (mass infantry and cavalry charges, etc). This resulted in massive casualties but minimal advance on the battlefield.
Was WWI a completely avoidable and senseless waste of lives? Did only a few lefty-progressive radicals see it as such and were they the only intelligent and honorable people on the continent? I found this scenario way too pat, simplistic and (frankly) partisan.
Sleepwalkers
As a consequence of my dissatisfaction with To End All Wars, I read a dozen or so reviews of other WWI books and landed on Christopher Clark’s much-praised The Sleepwalkers.
Clark makes no bones about portraying the Serbs as the major troublemakers in Balkans. There was vast popular support amongst them for creating “Great Serbia”, which included all areas inhabited by south Slavs. Two Balkan wars fought before WWI dismembered remnants of Ottoman Empire to this end. Serbia was backed by big brother Russia, the self-described “Third Rome”, defender of Orthodoxy and protector of Slavs, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Secret societies dedicated to “re-unification” of a (real or imagined) south Slav homeland permeated the Serbian military and government at the turn of the 20th C. These organizations, specifically the nefarious Black Hand, led by Captain Apis, were responsible for the Serbian regicide in 1903. Austria-Hungary declared sovereignty over Bosnia-Herzgovinia, considered to be part of Great Serbia, in 1908 and brought hatred of the Dual Monarchy amongst enthusiasts of Pan-Slavism and Great Serbia to a fever-pitch, which was exploited by organizations like the Black Hand. Ultimately Apis and his ilk most likely financed, trained and armed the assassins of June 28th, 1914, although whether or not “official” Serbia was involved remains a contentious question.
Other major points in Clark’s book include the very fractured policy making in the executive branches of all European countries at the time. Factions within foreign offices (and defence ministries) controlled foreign policy; the chief executive and legislatures often had much less influence over it than they thought. Treaties (and “understandings”) were often made without the latter two’s full knowledge.
Poor intelligence compounded the confusion caused by the foreign offices. There were, for example, gross overestimates by all of the rest of the powers of Russia’s industrial and military might, but underestimates of her willingness to mobilize for war.
The French foreign office generally and Prime Minister Poncaire, in particular, come across in Clark’s book as looking for an excuse to go to war with Germany. Their reason was simple: vengeance for loss of Franco-Prussian war, including the territories of Alsace-Lorraine, in 1871, compounded with fear of Germany’s growing industrial and military might. France allied herself with Russia with the specific purpose of containing Germany, and French ambassador Paleologue goaded Russia into the first mobilization of the war on July 30, 1914, in response to Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia. Long before the actual outbreak of hostilities, France (at least the Foreign Office and Poncaire) had already worked out with Russia a “Balkan inception” scenario for a war against Austria-Hungary and its main ally Germany.
And Clark avers that, in contrast to the simplistic picture painted by Hochschild, there were definitely anti-war voices at high levels in almost all of the European power’s executive branches. Unsurprisingly (except perhaps to those of Hochschild’s political stamp) they were mostly ministers of economy (and businessmen) who saw a European war as a potential disaster for (free) trade. In the end, they lost out to more aggressive voices in both foreign and war ministries.
Britain initially consciously sat on the periphery of all of this. Her main interest was protecting her empire from Russia, with whom she’d had conflicts in Persia, Central Asia and China. She did this through on-again, off-again alliances with and against Russia. She traditionally had a stronger alliance with France but did not see herself as being committed to intervene in a European war. In one of the starkest contradictions amongst the books I’ve read, Clark paints a portrait of Edward Grey, British Foreign Minister, as a “Russophile” and “Germanophobe” who was intent on getting Britain into the war, vs Otte’s picture of him as the unsung hero of the July Crisis who did everything in his power to avoid the coming conflagration.
Germany felt hemmed in: there was no room for conquests in Europe, she was a late-comer to the colonial game (a latecomer to being a unified country!), and she feared Russia’s long term potential to overwhelm her economically and militarily.
Kings, emperors and Czars are portrayed in Clark’s book as being a bit more than figureheads but much less than true strong executives. If not cajoled into accepting their minister’s programs, they were brought in to ratify their fait acompli decisions at the last minute, and had little input into actual policy making.
Clark spends a lot of time talking about how complicated the whole scenario was and how nobody was really to blame, how things spun out of control due to contingency and limitations of both national and international institutions of the day and blah, blah blah, which sounds to me like an excuse for not wanting to drawn the obvious conclusions and hurt somebody’s feelings. And he has an absurd chapter on “the crisis of masculinity” a psycho-sexual analysis of fin-de-siècle manhood that might play well in the odd “Gender Studies” classroom, but seems decidedly out of place in a serious history.
The July Crisis -Thomas Otte
In my opinion, this is the best book of the lot. As the title suggests, Otte maintains a razor-sharp focus on the events between the assassination of the Archduke in Sarajevo and the Russian mobilization, and dissects them in excruciating detail. And in contrast to Clark, he is not afraid to address the “Whys” of the conflict and sort out the guilty parties. I’ll distill his take on reasons for war. Though not absolving the Serbian assassins of their obvious guilt, his overall view of Serbia is more nuanced than Clark’s and he points out the stupidity of the Austro-Hungarian officials (Gen Potiak) in charge of Franz Ferdinand’s visit to Sarajevo and FF’s own bull-headedness in face of the incendiary situation on the ground during his visit there. Next he points out the importance of Germany giving its weak ally Austria-Hungary a “blank check” with regards to backing up its course of retribution against Serbia, then allowing itself to led down the path to doom and destruction by Vienna in pursuit of vengeance for assassination of FF.
Much of blame for the latter policy rested squarely on the shoulders of the intransigent Austrian foreign minister Berchtold and on the glacial pace of A-H’s response to Sarajevo. It has been speculated that a quick and decisive reaction, while it might have angered a few non-participants, might have spared the world the global conflict that actually resulted. Once Berchtold had gone through the painstaking process of lining up the support he needed from both the Hungarian side of the Dual Monarchy (Hungarian Count Tisza) and from Germany, with the infamous “blank check”, he proceeded to lead the drafting of an ultimatum to Serbia that is widely regarded to have been unanswerable by anything other than surrender of sovereignty or war. However the Serbs crafted a very clever reply to the A-H ultimatum that Otte, as well as many of the players in the actual events, including Kaiser Wilhelm, thought could have led to a negotiated settlement (“A brilliant achievement,” said the Kaiser of the ultimatum and Serbia’s response to it, and “a great moral success for Austria…all reason for war is gone”). And there were attempts to foment negotiations from both the British and the Russians, all rejected by the Austrians and the Germans. Unfortunately, the myopic A-H gov’t had already decided on war, regardless of European or worldwide consequences. In spite of this, Kaiser Wilhelm did not cancel the blank check.
In Otte’s account, in contrast to Clark’s, British Foreign Minister Grey comes across as the unsung hero, trying right up to the “11th hour” to prevent a war through negotiation. The German Ambassador to Britain, Linchnovski, was his counterpart through much of this but, unfortunately, was basically ignored and undercut by his own bosses, chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and Foreign Minister Jagow who did not support his peace overtures and, in fact, encouraged Austria to proceed more quickly with a war of retribution with Serbia.
The Great War for Peace – William Mulligan
Mulligan contends that WWI was not an unmitigated disaster, that it in fact laid the foundations of the multi-national organizations that evolved into those that underpin the world’s ability to resolve conflicts and avoid similar catastrophes today. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, with his fourteen points, was the driving force behind many of the progenitors of these institutions. Overall, I found this book did not hold my interest as readily as Otte’s or even Clark’s.
Serbia in the Great War – Mira Radojevic and Ljubodrag Dimic
The merits of Radojevic and Dimic’s book are threefold. They highlight the agility of Prime Minister Nikola Pasic in governing a very fractious and difficult to manage state and in responding to the Bosnian crisis. He also comes across quite well in two of the other three books I read. Secondly, they do a good job of portraying the suffering of the Serbia people through the war in the face of the barbarism of the supposedly “civilized” Austro-Hungarian occupying forces, which was well documented by a handful of outside observers. Thirdly, they chronicle the heroic effort necessary to preserve the Serbian Army and apparatus of state through their march to exile on the island of Corfu and eventual return to combat and their homeland through Greece and Bulgaria at the end of the war.
A few notes on WWI
1) 10 million dead
2) Destruction of cities, towns, farmlands, infrastructure
3) Fought with transformational technology (esp machine gun and barbed wire), but antiquated strategy and tactics. Neither side had apparently learned much from the American Civil war, which was so deadly for many of the same reasons.
4) Extremely effective defensive tactics (trench warfare), with no effective offense to counter until introduction of tanks, late in the war
5) No one wanted to sit down at the negotiating table until way too late
WWI transformed Europe catalyzing:
6) Socialist revolutions and the fall of monarchies in Russia and in Germany, Austria-Hungary
7) Acceleration of transformational social movements like women’s suffrage, trade unionism
8) The rise of Nazism in Germany and, ultimately WWII
9) Beginning of the end of European empires (except Russian/Soviet); finally finished off by WWII and its aftermath.
10) WWI (together with its penultimate chapter, WWII) was the beginning of the end of any claim by European civilization to be better, more enlightened, etc, than other civilizations. Catalyzed independence movements and anti-colonialism worldwide.
