The First World War: A Complete History

The First World War

A Complete History

Martin Gilbert

Copyright

The First World War: A Complete History

Copyright © 1994, 2014 by Martin Gilbert

Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover jacket design by David Ter-Avanesyan/Ter33Design

ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795337239

Contents

List of maps

Introduction

Acknowledgements

1. Prelude to war

2. ‘Wild with joy’

3. The opening struggle

4. From Mons to the Marne

5. Digging in: the start of trench warfare

6. Towards the first Christmas: ‘mud and slime and vermin’

7. Stalemate and the search for breakthroughs

8. The Gallipoli landings

9. The Entente in danger

10. The Central Powers in the ascendant

11. The continuing failure of the Entente

12. ‘This war will end at Verdun’

13. ‘Europe is mad. The world is mad.’

14. The Battle of the Somme: ‘It is going to be a bloody holocaust’

15. War on every front

16. The intensification of the war

17. War, desertion, mutiny

18. Stalemate in the west, turmoil in the east

19. Battle at Passchendaele; Revolution in Russia

20. The terms of war and peace

21. The Central Powers on the verge of triumph

22. Germany’s last great onslaught

23. ‘The battle, the battle, nothing else counts’

24. The Allied counter-attack

25. The turn of the tide

26. The collapse of the Central Powers

27. The final armistice

28. Peacemaking and remembrance

29. ‘…to the memory of that great company’

Bibliography

Maps

Index

Endnotes

Maps

REGIONS

1 Europe in 1914

2 The Mediterranean

3 The United States and Canada

4 Great Britain

5 Germany

6 Austria-Hungary

7 The Ottoman Empire

8 Bulgaria, the Black Sea and the Aegean

9 The War Fronts

CAMPAIGNS

10 The Western Front, 1–22 August 1914

11 The Western Front, 1914, from Mons to the Marne

12 The Western Front, 1914–15

13 The Eastern Front, 1914–16

14 The Dardanelles and Gallipoli

15 The Italian Front

16 Serbia

17 Verdun

18 The Salonica Front

19 The Somme

20 Bukovina, Transylvania, Roumania

21 The Western Front, 1916–17

22 Palestine and Syria

23 Mesopotamia

24 The Eastern Front, 1917–18

25 The Western Front, 1918

26 The Western Front, the last three months

27 Siberia

AFTERMATH

28 German territorial losses in Europe

29 German losses overseas

30 The fragmentation of Austria-Hungary

31 The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire

Introduction

More than nine million soldiers, sailors and airmen were killed in the First World War. A further five million civilians are estimated to have perished under occupation, bombardment, hunger and disease. The mass murder of Armenians in 1915, and the influenza epidemic that began while the war was still being fought, were two of its destructive by-products. The flight of Serbs from Serbia at the end of 1915 was another cruel episode in which civilians perished in large numbers; so too was the Allied naval blockade of Germany, as a result of which more than three-quarters of a million German civilians died.

Two very different wars were fought between 1914 and 1918. The first was a war of soldiers, sailors and airmen, of merchant seamen and civilian populations under occupation, where individual suffering and distress were on a massive scale, particularly in the front-line trenches. The second was a war of War Cabinets and sovereigns, of propagandists and idealists, replete with political and territorial ambitions and ideals, determining the future of Empires, nations and peoples as sharply as the battlefield. There were times, particularly in 1917 and 1918, when the war of armies and the war of ideologies combined, leading to revolution and capitulation, and to the emergence of new national and political forces. The war changed the map and destiny of Europe as much as it seared its skin and scarred its soul.

As a schoolboy in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, I was very conscious of the First World War, although it had ended twenty-seven years earlier. The school porter, ‘Janitor Johnson’, a former Royal Marine, was a veteran of the naval attack on Zeebrugge in 1918, and was said to have been recommended for an award for valour there. The headmaster, Geoffrey Bell, had won the Military Cross on the Western Front, but had pacifist instincts which he made known to the boys. One of my first history masters, A.P. White, had also fought in the trenches: he would march up and down the classroom with a broom over his shoulder, singing military songs. When I began work on this book his letters from the trenches were published, revealing great suffering and sensitivity. My father’s elder brother, my uncle Irving, had fought on the Somme: his experiences had scarred him, and we boys in the family were warned not to question him. He died as I was writing this book, at the age of ninety-three.

During my National Service in 1954 and 1955, the First World War was an ever-present memory. The infantry regiment with which I trained, the Wiltshires, had lost a battalion at Reutel, in the Ypres Salient, when 1,000 men were all but wiped out, and the few survivors were taken prisoner in October 1914. Another battalion had been all but wiped out, in a few minutes, on the slopes of Chunuk Bair, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, in 1915. A third battalion had been trapped by German naval gunfire on the Salonica Front in 1917. During my academic researches, whatever subject I was working on, whether the British Empire in India at the turn of the century or the establishment of Soviet rule in the Ukraine in the 1920s, the First World War continued to impinge on my researches. My supervisor on Indian history, C.C. Davies, had been wounded on the Western Front and was still troubled by his wound. My work on historical geography in the early 1960s took me to Arnold Toynbee’s flat in London. On his mantelpiece were photographs of half a dozen young men in uniform. I asked him who they were. He told me they were his closest friends at university before 1914: all had been killed in the trenches.

Over several decades my travels took me to many of the war zones and places associated with the war. In 1953, encouraged by one of my history masters, Alan Palmer, I travelled through several of the regions whose war memorials introduced me to the differing perspectives on the war: and also to Vienna, where the Hofburg and the Ballhausplatz recalled both the ageing Emperor and his Foreign Ministers; to Ljubljana, which as Laibach had been one of the cities whose Slav population sought independence from Austria and whose soldiers chafed at their role in maintaining the Hapsburg Empire; and to Venice, threatened in 1917 by the imminent arrival of the Austrian army.

In June 1957, in Sarajevo, I stood on the spot where Gavrilo Princip had fired the fatal shot in June 1914. Even under the Yugoslav Communist regime Princip was hailed as one of the forerunners of national independence. A concrete paving stone was set with two footsteps, commemorating the act which plunged Europe into its four-year conflict. In Belgrade that year I looked across the river to where the Austrians had bombarded the Serb capital on the first day of war. A decade later I went with my father to the Western Front: we stayed at Arras, to the east of which the military cemeteries are the last relics of the battles of 1917 and 1918, and at Ypres, where we listened each evening at eight o’clock to the Last Post, sounded at the Menin Gate by two members of the Ypres Fire Brigade.

While the buglers played under the vast archway of the Menin Gate, all traffic was stopped. The cost of their work was paid for in part by a legacy from Rudyard Kipling, whose only son was killed at Loos. On the walls and columns of the monumental gate are carved the names of 54,896 British soldiers killed in the salient between October 1914 and mid-August 1917 who have no known grave. On the stonework are the shrapnel marks of the fighting there in the Second World War. The last of the stonemasons were still at work engraving the names of 1914–18 when the German armies arrived, as conquerors, in May 1940. The stonemasons were repatriated to Britain.

From the Menin Gate, my father and I walked through the salient, trench maps in hand, reading at each battle site the accounts given in General Edmond’s multi-volume official history, the letters and recollections of soldiers, and the poetry. We stood in silence, as all visitors do, at the Tyne Cot Memorial at Passchendaele, on which are carved the names of a further 34,888 soldiers killed in the salient between mid-August 1917 and the end of the war in November 1918, of whom no trace was found sufficient to identify them for burial. In the cemetery in front of the memorial are more than 11,000 individual named graves. Not even the well-mown grass, the carefully tended flower beds and the fifty-year-old trees could lessen the shocking impact of so many names and graves. Not far away, at Menin, which was held by the Germans for all but one month of the war, we visited the military cemetery where 48,049 German soldiers are buried.

Fifteen years after my visit to the site of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, where the First World War could be said to have started, I made the journey to the woodland clearing near Rethondes in France, to see a replica of the railway carriage in which the Germans signed the armistice in November 1918. It was in the same carriage that Hitler insisted on receiving the French surrender in June 1940. Many links between the two wars are a reminder that only twenty-one years lay between them. Many of those who fought in the trenches in the First World War were leaders in the Second World War, like Hitler, Churchill and de Gaulle, or, like Rommel, Zhukov, Montgomery and Gamelin, became commanders in the second. Others, like Ho Chi Minh, who volunteered to serve with the French as a Vietnamese orderly in the First World War, and Harold Macmillan, who fought and was wounded on the Western Front, rose to prominence after the Second World War.

In 1957 I visited the battle zones on the Russo-Turkish border, and the towns where hundreds of thousands of Armenians were massacred in the first year of the war. Ten years later I was in the military cemetery in Gaza, where the headstones, set specially low because of the possibility of earthquake, record the deaths of the thousands of soldiers who perished in one of the fiercest Anglo-Turkish clashes. I have stood on the spot just outside Jerusalem where two British soldiers, up early one morning in search of eggs, saw approaching them a group of dignitaries, including priests, imams and rabbis, and were offered, instead of food, the surrender of the Holy City. Starting in 1969, I travelled for three consecutive years to the Gallipoli Peninsula, reading aloud from Aspinall-Oglander’s two-volume official war history, and from other works, at many of the landing beaches, gullies and hilltops of the peninsula. The contrast between its modern beauty and stillness, and the knowledge of the fighting and suffering there in 1915, has never ceased to haunt me.

During my work on Winston Churchill, I also read aloud, in the courtyards of the farms where he wrote them, the daily letters from Churchill to his wife from the trenches of the Western Front, in which he recognised the endurance of those who could not return, as he could after six months, to the comfort of civilian life in London. Eight years before the outbreak of war in 1914, in a private letter to his wife from German army manoeuvres at Würzburg, to which he had been invited by the Kaiser, Churchill wrote: ‘Much as war attracts me and fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations, I feel more deeply every year—& can measure the feeling here in the midst of arms—what vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.’

In 1991, a few months after the fall of the Iron Curtain, I was in the newly independent Ukraine, where I wandered through the former Austrian barracks in the former border town of Brody, through which the Russian army marched with such confidence in 1914 during its initial triumph, and out of which it was driven within the year. Despite the decision of Lenin and the Bolsheviks to pull out of the war in March 1918, fighting on the Eastern Front continued, mostly in the form of a civil war, and then as a Russo-Polish war, for two years longer than in the west. Along the road from Brody to Lvov I passed the great bronze cavalry horse and rider who point (or pointed then, before all things Communist were pulled down) with such triumph towards Warsaw. This striking pair commemorated the Bolshevik attempt to overrun Poland in 1920. Like the efforts of their Russian compatriots six years earlier to retain Poland, they had fought and died in vain. In Warsaw I have stood several times over the years at the unknown soldier’s memorial: it commemorates not an unknown soldier of the 1914–18 war, as at Westminster Abbey or beneath the Arc de Triomphe, but an unknown victim of the Russo-Polish War of 1920.

During four decades, many soldiers have spoken to me about their experiences on all fronts. As a young soldier myself, in 1954 and 1955, I visited old people’s homes where the often shattered survivors of the trenches were living and dying. In the course of my historical researches, which began in 1960, I met many old soldiers, sailors and airmen from all the belligerent armies. Their recollections, and the letters and documents that they had kept, were a window on the past. So too was the personal encouragement of one of the historians of the First World War, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, and three of my senior colleagues when I went to Merton College, Oxford, as a junior research fellow in 1962, Alistair Hardy, Hugo Dyson and Michael Polanyi, each of whom had seen the noblest and the ugliest sides of that distant war, Hardy and Dyson as soldiers on the Western Front, Polanyi as a medical officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army.

During my Churchill work I met the eighty-year-old General Savory, who had served at Gallipoli, and who invited me to run my finger along the hollow in his skull caused by a Turkish bullet. He had gone on to serve in Mesopotamia and Siberia. An airman, Richard Bell Davies, who had also fought at Gallipoli, where he won the Victoria Cross, produced from his wallet a piece of wartime toilet paper on which was printed a portrait of the German Kaiser with the words ‘Wipe your bottom on me’.

Two other soldiers who had served on the Western Front from the first weeks influenced me by their friendship and by their writings. One was the French painter Paul Maze, DCM, MM with bar, Croix de Guerre, who came to live in England after the First World War, and who escaped from France as the German army entered Paris in June 1940. He had served on the Western Front as a reconnaissance expert for four years, a witness to each of the main British offensives. The second soldier was the British politician Major-General Sir Edward Louis Spears, MC, who entered Parliament after the First World War, and in June 1940 brought General de Gaulle to England. Both Maze and Spears were able, in their books and in their conversation about the First World War, to give a portrait in words of the actions and moods of Flanders, the hopes of the soldiers, and the perils of the four-year journey from the declaration of war in 1914 to the armistice in 1918.

On 3 September 1976, a day still vivid in my memory, I lunched with Anthony Eden (then Earl of Avon) at his home in Wiltshire. He talked about episodes of the Second World War, the outbreak of which had taken place exactly thirty-seven years earlier, and in which his twenty-year-old son Simon, a Pilot Officer in the Royal Air Force, had been killed in action in Burma in June 1945. We spoke of the British decision to go to the aid of Greece in 1941 and the dangers of a Russian collapse, or even a separate Nazi-Soviet peace, in 1942.

There were many echoes in our talk of the First World War, including Britain’s decision in 1915 to help Serbia (through the same port city of Salonica that Greece was helped in part in 1941) and the impact of the Russian withdrawal from the war in 1917. One of Eden’s most vivid memories was of being told, while he was in the trenches of the Western Front, that his brother Nicholas had been killed in action at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Nicholas Eden, in charge of a gun turret on the Indefatigable, was just sixteen when he died.

Harold Macmillan also helped me in my Churchill work, in correspondence, and in talks at his home and mine, but it was not until I was writing this book that I learned that his spidery handwriting, limp handshake, and the somewhat ungainly shuffle of his walk, were each the result of wounds sustained in action in 1916.

My travels taught me that there was no area of Europe free from the memories and monuments of the First World War. Cities such as Warsaw and Lille, Brussels and Belgrade knew the full rigours of occupation in two world wars. From Prague and Budapest, Berlin and Vienna, Constantinople and Athens, Paris and Rome, London and New York, Cape Town and Bombay, troops had left for the war zones, and those who returned, after the shock and prolongation of battle, found cities, in Europe at least, where privation and grief had replaced the earlier, brief enthusiasms. In each city monuments recorded the loss.

While travelling, I studied the wording and the iconography of war memorials everywhere. These testified to every form of destruction, from the graves of individual soldiers and civilians to the monuments recording the death of more than half a million horses in the war zones, and a further 15,000 drowned on their way to war: these memorials form a stark, often beautiful, sometimes grotesque reminder of the destruction. Their unveiling and dedication, such as that in 1936 of the Canadian memorial on Vimy Ridge, prolonged the impact of retrospection. Even after the Second World War it was the sight of the bemedalled veterans of the First World War that made the greatest impact at Armistice Day parades. In Boulogne in 1974 I watched the parade of old soldiers of both world wars, led by a stooped survivor of the Battle of the Marne of sixty years earlier, who was given pride of place at the head of the procession.

The battles formed the framework and daily reporting of the war, but mutinies, strikes and revolution echoed the footsteps of the fighting men, as did the work of millions in factories and labour battalions. Mustard gas was an extra hazard for the fighting men. Submarines sent thousands of merchant seamen, soldiers and civilians to unmarked graves. Aerial bombardment added a civilian dimension of terror. Hunger and privation were the lot of millions of citizens behind the lines.

My own researches led to several books in which the First World War had an important place, among them Sir Horace Rumbold, Portrait of a Diplomat, which covered the outbreak of the war from the perspective of a British diplomat in Berlin; the third and fourth volumes of the Churchill biography, in which the Dardanelles, the Western Front and the munitions war each had its place; and The Atlas of the First World War, covering every front and aspect of warmaking. The impact of the war on Jewish and Arab aspirations in the Middle East was the subject of three chapters in Exile and Return, The Struggle for a Jewish Homeland. The impact of the war on the peace treaties and the inter-war years was a feature of the letters and documents that I published in 1964 in Britain and Germany Between the Wars.

Also in 1964, shortly after I had given an Oxford typing agency the manuscript of my book The European Powers 1900–1945, the head of the agency, Mrs Wawerka, asked to see me. In the book I had ascribed to Austria some of the responsibility for the coming of war in 1914. This had puzzled and distressed her. She had been born and educated in Vienna; as a Jewess she had been forced to leave Austria in 1938 but she knew for a fact that Austria was innocent of any responsibility for the events of 1914. The blame should be put (and ought to have been put by me) upon the Serbs and Russians.

This episode made a strong impact on me, as did Mrs Wawerka’s description of the desperate hunger in Vienna after the war, and the unfairness, as she saw it, of the post-war settlement that dismantled the Hapsburg Empire.

For some it was a war to punish and chastise. For others it became the war to end war. Its name, the Great War, indicated its hitherto unprecedented scale. It was followed, however, by a second even more destructive war, and by other ‘lesser’ wars throughout the world. In January 1994 there were an estimated thirty-two wars being waged somewhere on earth. The First World War continues to have its place in the discussion of these modern conflicts. On 26 December 1993, while I was writing this book, a British television journalist, commenting on the lack of any Christmas truce in Bosnia, reported, against the background of a deep trench: ‘Around Vitez the trench system is a reminder of the First World War, complete with mud.’ The trench as shown was not particularly muddy, or waterlogged, nor was it under shellfire. But the imagery of the First World War has remained for eighty years, and through several generations. A relatively short period of time, a war that lasted for four years and three months, has inspired, puzzled and disturbed the whole century that followed.

Some of the political changes that the First World War created were as destructive as the war itself, both of life and of liberty, and were to perpetuate tyranny for more than half a century. Some of the frontier changes of the First World War, intended to put right long-standing wrongs, are still a cause of dispute and conflict today.

In 1923, in the introduction to his book The Irish Guards in the Great War, Rudyard Kipling wrote: ‘The only wonder to the compiler of these records is that any sure fact whatever should be retrieved out of the whirlpools of war.’ Since the first shots were fired eighty years ago, authors have pursued their researches into both the main and the obscure episodes of the war, and into the puzzles. This book is an attempt to convey my own researches, readings, feelings and perspectives on an event that, like the Holocaust in later years, left a searing mark on the western world. It is also an attempt to tell, within the framework of commanders, strategies and vast numbers, the story of individuals.

If each of the nine million military dead of the First World War were to have an individual page, the record of their deeds and suffering, their wartime hopes, their pre-war lives and loves, would fill twenty thousand books the size of this one. Individual suffering is not something that is easily conveyed in a general history, yet all historians try to do it. On 3 December 1993, I was struck by three short sentences in a review by Meir Ronnen of two books on the First World War. The review appeared in the Jerusalem Post, where Ronnen wrote: ‘Millions died or suffered in the mud of Flanders between 1914–18. Who remembers them? Even those with names on their graves are by now unknown soldiers.’

No single book can redress that balance, though several fine books have tried to do so, among them, most recently, those in Britain by Lyn Macdonald and in France by Stephanie Audouin-Rouzeau (one of the books being reviewed by Meir Ronnen; the other was a biography of the poet Isaac Rosenberg, killed in action on April Fools’ Day 1918). In this book, I have tried to give the suffering of individuals its integral part in the narrative of the wider war.

Martin Gilbert

Merton College Oxford

20 June 1994

Acknowledgements

Many people have encouraged me over the years to explore different aspects of the First World War, or have guided me towards little-known shelves and corners of the vast literature. Charles Mahjoubian, a survivor of the massacre of the Armenians, encouraged me to make the story of the Armenian massacres an integral part of the narrative. Two of my doctoral students, Martin Ceadel and John Turner, chose the First World War as their ‘period’. Both have since published books to which all students of the war are grateful, none more so than their former supervisor. Larry Arnn’s doctoral thesis, ‘Winston S. Churchill as Minister of Munitions’, has also been of value to a former boss, and long-standing friend.

My bibliographical and factual knowledge has been enhanced by the help of several friends, among them Clinton Bailey, David Harman, Zena Harman, Jeffrey Siegel, Sarah Meron and Simon Broadbent. As always, Erich Segal has been my guide to all classical allusions. Others who have sent me information are J.W. Bakewell, Dr Vojtech Blodig (Theresienstadt Museum), I.L. Buxton, Andrew Baker, Robert Craig, Sir Brian Fall, Martin Greenwood (Assistant Curator, Kenwood House), Bruce Gaynor, J.P. Gee (Commonwealth War Graves Commission), Julie Kessler, Michael Levine, Len Mader (External Affairs and International Trade, Canada), T.P. Penfold (Commonwealth War Graves Commission), J.P. Rudman (The Archivist, Uppingham School), Colonel William E. Ryan Jr (The American Battle Monuments Commission, Washington DC), Jean Saunders, Dr Harry Shukman, Chris Thomas (Bank of England Reference Library), Sir David Williams, Georgina Wilson, and the Claremont Institute of Claremont, California. I am also grateful for bibliographic help to Professor Oleg Rzheshevski of Moscow and Pauline Underwood (the Macmillan Press Ltd). Like all those who have made use of the British Government archives, I am grateful to the Keeper and staff of the Public Record Office at Kew.

The excerpts from Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain are included with the permission of Paul Berry, her literary executor, Victor Gollancz Ltd (for the British edition) and the Virago Press, London (for the United States edition). I am grateful to the following for permission to reproduce poetry: to George Sassoon, for poems by Siegfried Sassoon (from Collected Poems 1908–1956, Faber & Faber); to A. P. Watt on behalf of Crystal Hale and Jocelyn Herbert, for a poem by A. P. Herbert; to Macmillan Publishers Ltd, for a poem by E. Hilton Young (from A Muse at Sea, Sidgwick & Jackson); and to David Higham Associates, for a poem by Herbert Read (from Selected Poetry, Faber & Faber).

I found all the photographs in this book in the Robert Hunt Library, to whose treasures I was first introduced for my Second World War history by Graham Mason, who also let me range freely through the Library’s voluminous holdings on the First World War. I have listed the copyright holders for each picture in the list of illustrations. The maps were drawn from my rough drafts by Tim Aspden, who has given them the benefit of his cartographic skills. The typescript was read by my former teacher, Alan Palmer, and gained considerably (as my school essays did forty years ago) from his thoughts and guidance. The expert eye of Dr A.J. Peacock, editor of Gun Fire, A Journal of First World War History, has also been of great value. Ben Helfgott made many useful points of style and content. Proofreading was done by Chris Bessant in Britain and by Arthur Neuhauser in the United States; I am grateful to both of them for their vigilance. Benjamin Buchan at Weidenfeld and Nicolson was helpful on various points of content, as was Ion Trewin. Rachelle Gryn helped in tracking down many elusive facts, as did Kay Thomson, who also helped with the correspondence and revisions. Susie Gilbert has, as with all my work, given the text her scrutiny and guidance.

1

Prelude to war

War between the Great Powers was much talked about in the first decade of the twentieth century, by politicians, writers, novelists and philosophers. Yet the nature of a European war, as opposed to a colonial venture, was little understood. What was known were the many swift forays by superior forces against distant, feeble foes, the victory of machine guns against spears, of massive naval guns against antique cannon. However frightening those conflicts could be for those who took part in them, the general public at home had little sense of anything terrible.

Why should war in Europe be feared? Shortly before the outbreak of war in 1914 a French colonel, who had been a teenager when Germany invaded France in 1870, was listening to a group of young officers drinking to the prospect of war and laughing about the possibility of conflict. He brought their laughter to an abrupt end with the question: ‘And do you think that war is always gay, toujours drôle?’ His name was Henri-Philippe Pétain. Two years later, at Verdun, he was to witness one of the worst military slaughters of the twentieth century.

The French soldiers whose laughter Pétain brought to an abrupt end were heirs to a tradition of Franco-German enmity that had culminated more than forty years earlier, on 11 May 1871. For on that day, in the Swan Hotel at Frankfurt-on-Main, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck signed the agreement transferring all of Alsace and much of Lorraine to Germany. That day, in the German-occupied city of Metz, guns fired in celebration of the triumph. In the classrooms of the French Jesuit College of St Clement, wrote the British historian Basil Liddell Hart in 1931, ‘the message of the guns needed no interpreter. The boys jumped to their feet. The superintendent, rising more soberly, cried, Mes enfants!—and then, unable to say more, lowered his head and joined his hands as if in prayer. The memory of that terrible moment was not effaced from the minds of the students.’ One of those students was the nineteen-year-old Ferdinand Foch, who resented the fact that defeat had come before he could be sent into battle.

Not everyone in the newly-united Germany was satisfied by the victory over France. Other German ambitions were stirred as the Empire gained industrial strength. Aspirations for colonial expansion, for naval power at least as great as that of Britain, for influence over the Muslims of Asia, for a dominant part in the counsels of Europe, intensified the German sense of inferiority. Germany, united only in 1870, had come too late, it seemed, into the race for power and influence, for empire and respect. The need for a further war, and for the overwhelming military strength essential to win it, was the conclusion of the book Germany and the Next War, published by a retired German cavalry officer, Friedrich von Bernhardi, in 1912. Bernhardi had ridden as a conqueror through Paris in 1870. In his book he stressed the need for Germany either to make war or to lose the struggle for world power. The ‘natural law, upon which all the laws of nature rest’, he wrote, was ‘the law of the struggle for existence’. War was ‘a biological necessity’. German soldiers forty years younger than he were soon to test this confident theory on the battlefield, and to die testing it.