Go back fifty years in time and you are in a world which seems as remote as the age of the dinosaurs, which in some ways it indeed resembles; the age of the imperial dynasties which ruled a great part of Europe, rigid and wholly static anachronisms which had somehow survived into a time whose intense dynamism was altogether too much for them. Confronting the inevitable changes of the modern world, these dynasties could do nothing but try, with desperate incompetence, to repress all change. They thereby brought on, in 1914, an explosion which destroyed them utterly and left the world in a turmoil from which it has not yet emerged.
There were four of those dynasties—Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs, Romanovs, and Ottomans—and their empires had four hundred million subjects. Two of them, in Russia and in Turkey, were undisguised absolutisms in which the will of the sovereign was the only law; the other two had a thin veneer of parliamentary institutions but were almost equally autocratic in their essential structure. Not only were they incapable of adjusting themselves; they were visibly decaying, and one of the things that made the final explosion so inevitable and so terrible was the fact that the internal tensions of the autocracies crossed the external tensions which racked the whole international order. Even the most enlightened leadership would have been hard pressed to cope with the age of rising nationalism, twentieth-century technologies, and the unsatisfied demands of the common man, who had heard about Democracy. The leadership provided by the dynasties would have been substandard even by the values of Louis XIV. So the world blew up.
Nineteen fourteen: that was the break-off point. It opens the most fateful story of our time, and we are just beginning to see it. Nothing else that has happened to us for a thousand years quite matches this. We are the heirs of a wrecked society, of a broken continuity, of an age that collapsed just when we were most sure of it. Furthermore, the collapse was one of the most horrendous catastrophes in human history, a tragedy so vast that it left the emotions numb and so paved the way for future infamies. Ours is the incredible century. It opened brightly as an era whose institutions, even though they obviously needed an overhaul, at least seemed to be stable; in hardly more than a decade these institutions had come down in utter ruin, and the story would be beyond belief if we did not have the most compelling reasons to know that every word of it is true.
The Fall of the Dynasties, by Edmond Taylor. Doubleday & Co. 421 pp. $6.50.
There is at hand now a good account of the way the disaster came upon us, in Edmond Taylor’s book The Fall of the Dynasties. Mr. Taylor examines the years from 1905 to 1922 and makes a valiant attempt to see how it all happened. What he provides is a chilling analysis of the advent of an earthquake.
His primary thesis is that the decay of the dynastic system made war inevitable. The diplomats who stumbled into war were not really responsible to anybody. The emperors were dictators, but the machinery of government had got too complex for them. Their foreign ministries were self-activating bureaucracies which nobody really controlled; foreign affairs was a sort of chess game played under out-of-date rules by men who did not quite know what game they were playing.
By 1914 a general European war was the one thing above all others which the social and political structure of the Western world could not endure, and yet it was the threat of war which gave the structure its apparent stability. Although a huge armaments race insured that if war came it would be more destructive than anything men had ever heard of, the emperors and the diplomats believed that they could live on the brink of war, using the readiness to make war as the prop which shored up the whole intricate international system. Preparing for the greatest of wars, they still believed that war could be kept limited and localized. At the most they hoped that if a general war did come it would bring the roof down on their enemies rather than on themselves. Unfortunately, when the roof finally came down it fell on everybody.
On August 1, 1914, the German Kaiser signed the papers that began the plunge, and he had a fey moment of insight. Looking up at the generals who surrounded him, he remarked bitterly: “Gentlemen, you will live to regret this.” (He had just received a telegram from the Czar of Russia, who confessed despairingly: “I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure brought upon me and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war.”) A few days later someone asked the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, “How did it all happen?” The Chancellor threw up his arms: “Ah, if only one knew.”
The generals had taken over, but the only rule they could follow was the one their profession had taught them—when you get into an all-out war you have to win an all-out victory no matter what it costs. The trouble was that the cost was simply astronomical: so immense that in the end both victors and defeated lost what they were fighting for. The war turned, in Mr. Taylor’s apt remark, into “an accelerating retreat from civilization.” It rolled up the fantastic total of 37,000,000 casualties, of which more than 8,500,000 represented men killed in action or dead of disease, and it destroyed the society the armies thought they were fighting to preserve.
The collapse left the Western world with an intolerable burden. Not only did the empires disappear—and with all their grave faults they at least provided a framework that kept Europe from fragmentation and chaos—but something far more costly had happened to men’s minds, to their way of looking at the world they inhabited. The old certainties had been destroyed. Quite naturally, the ordinary man had lost faith “in the civilian leadership that had been unable to avert the catastrophe of general war, and in the military leadership which seemed incapable of winning it.” The next quarter-century would do very little to restore that faith.
To Bleed to Death
By BRUCE CATTON
Yet perhaps it was the way the war was fought that really did the damage, for it inflicted a psychic wound of the kind from which there is no easy recovery. Above everything else, that war was savage, with an insensate sort of savagery for which there is no good rationalization.
We are used to terrible things in our generation—fire raids on great cities, and the unspeakable hideousness of concentration camps dedicated to mass murder—yet the record of the kind of fighting that took place in the First World War remains one of the most appalling chapters in all history. We can hardly understand our own times without knowing something about the things men were forced to endure from 1914 to 1918.
Consider, for example, the great German attack on the French stronghold of Verdun, which took place in 1916 and which is described by Mr. Alistair Home in The Price of Glory.
The German battle plan here was peculiar. Erich von Falkenhayn, German generalissimo, believed that the French prized Verdun so much that they would defend it to the death regardless of cost. He did not especially want to capture it: he simply wanted to threaten it so much that the French Army would permit itself to be destroyed in its defense. So he proposed to wheel up overpowering artillery to blast a hole in the front line, occupy the gap with infantry, and then use the artillery to pulverize the unending stream of French reinforcements which would be sent in to restore the balance. The French would bleed to death. If it went on long enough, Germany might not win a victory but France would suffer a defeat.
The Price of Glory: Verdun, 1916, by Alistair Home. St Martin’s Press. 371 pp. $5.95.
Verdun, as Mr. Home says, was perhaps the worst battle ever fought. The proportion of casualties to numbers engaged was far higher than for any other battle in the war. Between them, the French and German armies lost more than 700,000 men. (Some estimates run much higher, and no one really knows what the exact figure ought to be. It is recorded that after the war 150,000 corpses, or bits of corpses, were collected from the battlefield and properly laid away; they ought to figure in the statistics somewhere, no doubt.) Nobody won anything, unless you count the “glory” gained by the French defenders. Falkenhayn bled his own army nearly as badly as he bled the French. Mr. Home sums it up as well as need be. Verdun, he says, was “the indecisive battle in an indecisive war; the unnecessary battle in an unnecessary war; the battle that had no victors in a war that had no victors.”
So why study it? Because it is a vital part of the story of the unmitigated savagery that mankind had to endure, and by which man’s spirit was mutilated, in the First World War. Nations do not quickly return to health after an ordeal which can be characterized as Mr. Home characterizes Verdun—as the battle which had “the highest density of dead per square yard that has probably ever been known.” When you have a battlefield containing many square miles and you count the dead by the number per square yard you have unquestionably reached the ultimate in something.
The echoes went a long way. Verdun left France with the Maginot line mentality, which brought disaster in 1940. It also did something to Marshal Philippe Pétain, the soldier who conducted the successful defense. Pétain was a humanitarian, and he seems to have been permanently stunned by what he had to make his soldiers do; in 1940, in another time of crisis, he was unable to be anything more than a receiver in bankruptcy for a beaten nation.
Offensive on the Somme
By BRUCE CATTON
Before the war ended mankind was at the mercy of its own machines of destruction. It had perfected the techniques of mass slaughter without mastering them, indeed without even thinking about them coherently, and it could do no more than stretch itself on a rack of its own construction. Dreadful as it was, Verdun was not really unique. There was also the Somme.
In a way, this battle at least rested on a brighter base. Sir Douglas Haig, who commanded the British army in France, believed that he could make an outright breakthrough, piercing the German line, rolling up the broken defenses, and going on with a powerful stroke that would win the war then and there. But Marshal Joseph Joffre, the French commander whose troops took a share in this offensive and who exercised a good deal of influence over Haig, saw it from the beginning as an exercise in simple attrition—a notion just about on Falkenhayn’s level—and in the end that is what it became. It may even have destroyed more men than were destroyed at Verdun, but possibly the density of corpses per square yard was somewhat lower.
In any case, the Somme offensive marked the first full-dress appearance of Kitchener’s “new army”—the great army of volunteers which Lord Kitchener raised and which contained the very flower of Britain’s young manhood. To find out what happened to this magnificent army read The Big Push by Brian Gardner, who tells a story which in its own way is as appalling as Mr. Home’s.
It began on the morning of July 1, 1916, when fourteen British divisions attacked along an eighteen-mile front. There had been a tremendous artillery bombardment, lasting the better part of a week, and in the rear there were massed cavalry divisions ready to charge through the anticipated breakthrough and go romping through the German rear areas. The infantrymen had high morale; they had been told, and devoutly believed, that this was the attack that would end the war, and although they were so overloaded with rations and incidental equipment (approximately sixty-six pounds per man) that they could not move faster than a sluggish walk, they went bravely forward in long, unbroken lines, confident that the bombardment had broken the German defenses.
The Big Push, by Brian Gardner. William Morrow and Co. 177 pp. $5.00.
Disillusionment came immediately. At the end of that day no gains worth mentioning had been made. Sixty thousand British soldiers had been shot down, a third of them dead or doomed to die of their wounds; all in all, it was, as Mr. Gardner says, “the most costly day the British Army has ever known.”
To suppose that this fearful disaster cost the British commander his job and led to an immediate cancellation of the offensive is to give way to a delusion. For one thing, army headquarters never at any time really knew just what was happening along the front line; for another, it paid little attention to anything the government at London wanted anyway; and Sir Douglas Haig was a most determined man who would carry out his plans, or at least persevere with them, though the heavens fell. So this doomed offensive went on, and on—during the second week, casualties averaged 10,000 a day—and the fight continued all summer, coming to a dismal close at last on November 18. If it had never come close to breaking the German line, it had at least dented it: along a twelve-mile front it made gains running in some places up to nearly eight miles; and, like Verdun, it has to go down in the books as a battle that might as well not have been fought …
… Except that the cost of it was so infernal. Exact figures are hard to come by. Officially, the British War Office says that the British Army lost about 420,000 men. The French lost 200,000, and the Germans lost about what the British lost. Altogether, the Somme offensive probably exacted at least a million casualties from the three armies involved.
The figures are bad enough. The way the thing was done was even worse. Not only was it directed by men who hardly knew what they were doing; the fighting men were not so much engaging in mortal combat as going into a hurricane created by superefficient instruments of destruction. Thousands of men died without once seeing their enemies, without even seeing anything they could recognize as the enemy’s position. The military men had learned how to use high explosives so that whole counties could be reduced to pulverized rubble; and they could think of nothing better to do with this discovery than to keep on shoving living men into the inferno, day after day and week after week. If, in the end, those who survived were somewhat disillusioned, their disillusionment is understandable.
The French Mutiny
By BRUCE CATTON
There is, after all, a limit to what men will put up with, and early in 1917 the French Army reached that limit.
When the year 1917 opened, the French Army had lost—in men killed, dead of wounds, captured, or simply “missing”—some 1,300,000 men. Reflecting on this, the French government at last nerved itself to relieve Marshal Joffre, and it replaced him with General Robert Nivelle, who had done well at Verdun and who believed that he knew how to break the German line. In the spring of 1917 Nivelle was allowed to conduct an all-out offensive along the Chemin des Dames, near Soissons.
Nivelle had devised certain tactical innovations which, he was convinced, would fracture the German lines quickly. His offensive would not be long-drawnout, like all former ones; it would be short, sharp, and decisive, and although both the government and the pessimistic Pétain grew very skeptical, Nivelle was a persuasive sort and he had his way. On the morning of April 16 the big fight began. To learn what came of it read Dare Call It Treason by Richard M. Watt.
What came of it was disaster followed by mutiny. Nivelle was as wrong as Joffre, Haig, and Falkenhayn, and all the rest. Instead of a breakthrough there was unredeemed slaughter, after which the French soldier concluded that he had had enough. The French Army mutinied: not en masse or by prearrangement, but by individual units, battalions, and divisions, spontaneous “walk outs” by men who were not asking anything in particular except an end to senseless killing. By the end of May the Army was almost wholly paralyzed, yet the mutinous troops were not actually a revolutionary force. They were just men who were in utter despair and who had made up their minds to make no more offensives.
The Army in short was in revolt, but it never formulated its demands and it formed no revolutionary councils. It created a situation which the organized leftist elements in the French Republic—numerous, active, and looking for an opening—did not recognize until it was too late. In the spring of 1917 France might have gone the way Russia went. All of the elements were there, yet they never quite combined to make a revolution.
A good deal is owed to Pétain. As in 1940, he became the trustee in bankruptcy, the difference in 1917 being that the nation still had substantial assets. The mutinous soldiers did not want to see either a German victory or a complete overturn of French society; they just wanted not to be wasted in offensives which had no chance to succeed. Taking over the supreme command of the Army, Pétain restored obedience: partly by giving the soldiers decent treatment, partly by abstaining from making senseless attacks on impregnable trench systems, and partly by a program of fairly stern repression. By the narrowest of margins, he kept the Army from disintegrating and so kept France from following the Russian pattern.
It is a strange and completely fascinating story that Mr. Watt recounts. The strangest part about it is the way in which the Army kept this mass mutiny more or less secret. Neither the Germans, the Allied powers, nor even the French people really knew what was happening. To this day the full story has not been told. As Mr. Watt says, the tale “trails off into silence.” The Army was nursed back to the point where it would at least obey its officers and defend the trenches, and in 1918 it was finally ready to take part in the counteroffensive which drove the Germans out of France and led to the Armistice. There are still gaps in the story of just how this was done. Perhaps the French Academy summed it up when, welcoming Pétain to membership, it apostrophized him: “You have discovered this: that fire kills.” And for a final word, Mr. Watt’s verdict is as good as any:
Dare Call It Treason, by Richard M. Watt. Simon and Schuster. 344 pp. $5.95.
“Perhaps the Army revolts of 1917 had their uses. Maybe it is unfair to label this convulsion of exhausted troops a ‘mutiny.’ At any rate, none dare call it treason.”
