The First World War Read online

  Acclaim for JOHN KEEGAN’s

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR

  “Eloquent.… Mr. Keegan captures the anomalous, even surreal quality of the war.… He uses his narrative abilities … to bring to life such famous engagements as Gallipoli, Verdun and Passchendaele.”

  —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Gripping.… Keegan remains a master.”

  —The New Republic

  “Undoubtedly the world’s most accessible and popular military historian.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Magisterial … quietly heart-rending.… Most impressively, it is a miracle of concision, compressing problems that have consumed entire books into two or three crystalline paragraphs.”

  —The Weekly Standard

  “[Keegan] peers closely at warfare’s nuts and bolts to render an epic tale.… Keegan’s ground-level approach makes us keenly aware of how battles are fought, won, and lost.”

  —Fortune

  “A masterpiece.”

  —GQ

  JOHN KEEGAN

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR

  John Keegan was for many years senior lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and has been a fellow at Princeton University and a professor of history at Vassar College. He is the author of thirteen previous books, including the acclaimed The Face of Battle and The Second World War. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

  ALSO BY JOHN KEEGAN

  The Face of Battle

  The Nature of War

  (with Joseph Darracott)

  World Armies

  Who’s Who in Military History

  (with Andrew Wheatcroft)

  Six Armies in Normandy

  Soldiers

  (with Richard Holmes)

  The Mask of Command

  The Price of Admiralty

  The Second World War

  A History of Warfare

  Fields of Battle

  The Battle for History

  War and Our World:

  The Reith Lectures 1998

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 2000

  Copyright © 1998 by John Keegan

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Hutchinson, an imprint of Random House UK Limited, London, in 1998. Published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Portions of this book were originally published in Military History Quarterly and The Yale Review.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Keegan, John.

  The First World War / John Keegan.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83170-5

  1. World War, 1914–1918. I. Title.

  D521.K345 1999

  940.3—dc21 98-31826

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To the men of Kilmington who did not

  return from the Great War, 1914–18

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Maps

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  ONE: A European Tragedy

  TWO: War Plans

  THREE: The Crisis of 1914

  FOUR: The Battle of the Frontiers and the Marne

  FIVE: Victory and Defeat in the East

  SIX: Stalemate

  SEVEN: The War Beyond the Western Front

  EIGHT: The Year of Battles

  NINE: The Breaking of Armies

  TEN: America and Armageddon

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Note About the Author

  Maps

  Europe at war, 1914

  The world at war, 1914

  The Schlieffen Plan

  The German advance, 1914

  The Western Front, 1914–18

  The Eastern Front, 1914–18

  Germany’s African territories

  The war in the Middle East

  Gallipoli

  The campaign in Serbia, 1915

  Jutland and the war in the North Sea

  The battle of Verdun

  The battle of the Somme

  The Brusilov offensive

  The Eastern Front, 1917–18

  The war in Italy, 1915–18

  The German offensives, 1918

  Illustrations

  Following this page

  Schlieffen (AKG)

  Hindenburg (RHPL)

  Ludendorff (RHPL)

  The Kaiser distributing Iron Crosses (RHPL)

  Conrad von Hötzendorf (RHPL)

  Joffre and Haig (RHPL)

  Pétain (ETA)

  Kemal Ataturk (RHPL)

  Brusilov (RHPL)

  The Guard Pioneer Battalion leaves Berlin (ETA)

  French infantrymen off to the front (ND-Viollet)

  A Russian reservist (Novosti)

  Belgian infantry (ETA)

  Machine-gun section of a French infantry regiment (ND-Viollet)

  French 75mm battery in action (Collection Viollet)

  German infantrymen at Tannenberg (ETA)

  Russian transport on the road to Przemysl (ETA)

  Soldiers of the French 87th Regiment at Verdun, 1916 (ETA)

  The 1st Lancashire Fusiliers on the Somme (TRH)

  A Grenadier Guards trench sentry, Somme (ETA)

  A working party of the Manchester Regiment before the battle of Arras (ETA)

  Following this page

  A water cart bogged at St. Eloi (ETA)

  Australians on a duckboard track, Château Wood, Ypres (ETA)

  Serbian headquarters crossing the Sizir bridge (RHPL)

  Austrian mountain gunners (TRH)

  Austrian mountain machine-gun section (TRH)

  French 75mm field gun (RHPL)

  Austrian 305mm howitzer (RHPL)

  British Vickers machine-gun crew (TRH)

  A Royal Engineers Signal Service visual signalling post (TRH)

  German infantry with an A7V tank (RHPL)

  German infantry in a communication trench (AKG)

  Breaking the Hindenburg Line: British infantry (AKG)

  Breaking the Hindenburg Line: British Mark IV tanks (AKG)

  American infantry advancing (AKG)

  Turkish gunners (RHPL)

  Australians and the Royal Naval Division share a trench (ETA)

  Wounded ANZAC coming down, replacements waiting to go up (TRH)

  Following this page

  Von Lettow-Vorbeck (AKG)

  SMS Seeadler leaving Dar-es-Salaam (AKG)

  SMS Blücher sinking (TRH)

  The Grand Fleet in the North Sea (ETA)

  The battlecruiser Invincible, broken in half by internal explosion, battle of Jutland; HM Destroyer Badger approaching to pick up the six survivors (TRH)

  American armed merchant ship Covington, sinking off Brest (TRH)

  The torpedo room of a U-boat (ETA)

  Fokker triplanes (TRH)

  Sopwith Camel (TRH)

  A squadron equipped with the SE 5a (TRH)

  A French soldier welcomed in the liberated war zone (RHPL)

  A Hessian regiment marching back across the Rhine (RHPL)

  A burial party at Windmill Cemetery (TRH)

  Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passchendaele, today (TRH)

  Abbreviations:

  AKG
AKG, London

  ETA E.T. Archive, London

  Novosti Novosti Press Agency, London

  RHPL Robert Hunt Picture Library, London

  TRH TRH Pictures, London

  Acknowledgements

  I grew up with men who had fought in the First World War and with women who had waited at home for news of them. My father fought in the First World War, so did his two brothers, so did my father-in-law. All four survived. My father’s and my father-in-law’s carefully censored memories of their war experiences first introduced me to the war’s nature. My father’s sister, one of the army of spinsters the war created, told me, towards the end of her life, something of the anxieties of those left behind. To them, and to the hundreds of other veterans directly and indirectly caught up in the war’s tragedy to whom I have spoken over the years, I owe the inspiration for this book.

  Personal recollections suffuse what I have written. Its substance derives from the reading of many years. For access to the books I have found most useful I would like to thank the Librarians and staff of the Libraries of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, the Staff College, the United States Military Academy, West Point, Vassar College and The Daily Telegraph. I am particularly grateful to Colonel Robert Doughty, Head of the Department of History at West Point, and to his Executive Officer, Major Richard Faulkner, who arranged for me to use the magnificent West Point Library while I was Delmas Visiting Professor at Vassar in 1997. I am also grateful to the Librarian and staff of the London Library and to Tony Noyes, Chairman of the Western Front Association.

  I owe important debts in the production of this book to my editor at Hutchinson, Anthony Whittome, to my editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green, to my picture editor, Anne-Marie Ehrlich, to the mapmaker, Alan Gilliland, Graphics Editor of The Daily Telegraph, and, as always, to my Literary Agent, Anthony Sheil. Lindsey Wood, who typed the manuscript, spotted unseen errors, deciphered hieroglyphics, checked bibliographies, reconciled inconsistencies and dealt with every sort of publishing difficulty, proved as before that she is a secretary without equal.

  Among others who in various ways gave help, I would like to acknowledge the forbearance of the Editor of The Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore, and the assistance of my colleagues Robert Fox, Tim Butcher, Tracy Jennings, Lucy Gordon-Clarke and Sharon Martin. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the proprietor of The Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black.

  Friends at Kilmington who make the writing of books possible include Honor Medlam, Michael and Nesta Grey, Mick Lloyd and Eric Coombs. My love and thanks as always go to my children and to my son-in-law, Lucy and Brooks Newmark, Thomas, Matthew and Rose, and to my darling wife, Susanne.

  The Manor House,

  Kilmington,

  23 July 1998

  Europe at war, 1914

  The world at war, 1914

  ONE

  A European Tragedy

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR was a tragic and unnecessary conflict. Unnecessary because the train of events that led to its outbreak might have been broken at any point during the five weeks of crisis that preceded the first clash of arms, had prudence or common goodwill found a voice; tragic because the consequences of the first clash ended the lives of ten million human beings, tortured the emotional lives of millions more, destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent and left, when the guns at last fell silent four years later, a legacy of political rancour and racial hatred so intense that no explanation of the causes of the Second World War can stand without reference to those roots. The Second World War, five times more destructive of human life and incalculably more costly in material terms, was the direct outcome of the First. On 18 September 1922, Adolf Hitler, the demobilised front fighter, threw down a challenge to defeated Germany that he would realise seventeen years later: “It cannot be that two million Germans should have fallen in vain … No, we do not pardon, we demand—vengeance!”1

  The monuments to the vengeance he took stand throughout the continent he devastated, in the reconstructed centres of his own German cities, flattened by the strategic bombing campaign that he provoked, and of those—Leningrad, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London—that he himself laid waste. The derelict fortifications of the Atlantic Wall, built in the vain hope of holding his enemies at bay, are monuments to his desire for vengeance; so, too, are the decaying hutments of Auschwitz and the remnants of the obliterated extermination camps at Sobibor, Belzec and Treblinka. A child’s shoe in the Polish dust, a scrap of rusting barbed wire, a residue of pulverised bone near the spot where the gas chambers worked, these are as much relics of the First as of the Second World War.2 They have their antecedents in the scraps of barbed wire that litter the fields where the trenches ran, filling the French air with the smell of rust on a damp morning, in the mildewed military leather a visitor finds under a hedgerow, in the verdigrised brass of a badge or button, corroded clips of ammunition and pockmarked shards of shell. They have their antecedents also in the anonymous remains still upturned today by farmers ploughing the bloodsoaked soil of the Somme—“I stop work at once. I have a great respect for your English dead”—just as the barely viewable film of bodies being heaped into the mass graves at Belsen in 1945 has its antecedents in the blurred footage of French soldiers stacking the cordwood of their dead comrades after the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915. The First World War inaugurated the manufacture of mass death that the Second brought to a pitiless consummation.

  There are more ceremonial monuments. Few French and British communities lack a memorial to the dead of the Second World War. There is one in my West Country village, a list of names carved at the foot of the funerary crucifix that stands at the crossroads. It is, however, an addition and an afterthought. The cross itself was raised to commemorate the young men who did not return from the First World War and their number is twice that of those killed in the Second. From a population of two hundred in 1914, W. Gray, A. Lapham, W. Newton, A. Norris, C. Penn, L. Penn and W. J. White, perhaps one in four of the village’s men of military age, did not come back from the front. Theirs are names found in the church registers that go back to the sixteenth century. They survive in the village today. It is not difficult to see from the evidence that the Great War brought heartbreak on a scale never known since the settlement was established by the Anglo-Saxons before the Norman Conquest and, thankfully, has not been known since. The memorial cross is, the church apart, the only public monument the village possesses. It has its counterpart in every neighbouring village, in the county’s towns, where the names multiply many times, and in the cathedral of the diocese at Salisbury. It has its counterpart, too, in every cathedral in France, in each of which will be seen a tablet bearing the inscription, “To the Glory of God and in memory of one million men of the British Empire who died in the Great War and of whom the greater number rest in France.”

  Nearby, certainly, will stand a memorial to the locality’s own dead, itself replicated in every surrounding town and village. France lost nearly two million in the Great War, two out of every nine men who marched away. They are often symbolised by the statue of a poilu, defiant in horizon blue, levelling a bayonet eastward at the German frontier. The list of names on the plinth is heartrendingly long, all the more heartrending because repetition of the same name testifies to more than one death, often several, in the same family. There are similar lists to be seen graven in stone in the towns and cities of most combatant nations of the Great War. Particularly poignant, I find, is the restrained classicism of the memorial to the cavalry division of the Veneto that stands beside the cathedral of Murano in the lagoon of Venice, bearing row after row of names of young men from the lowlands of the River Po who died in the harsh uplands of the Julian Alps. I am touched by the same emotion in the churches of Vienna where severe stone tablets recall the sacrifice of historic Habsburg regiments now almost forgotten to history.3

  The Germans, who cannot decently mourn their four million dead of the Second World War, compromised as the
Wehrmacht was by the atrocities of the Nazi state, found a materially, if not morally equivalent difficulty in arranging an appropriately symbolic expression of grief for their fallen of the First, since so many lay on foreign soil. The battlefields of the east were closed to them by the Bolshevik revolution, those of the west made at best grudgingly accessible for the retrieval and reburial of bodies. The French and the Belgians found little room in their hearts or in the national soil for the creation of German war cemeteries. While the British were accorded a sépulture perpétuelle for their places of burial, which ramified during the 1920s into an archipelago of gardened graveyards along the line of the Western Front breathtaking in their beauty, the Germans were obliged to excavate mass graves in obscure locations to contain the remains of their casualties. Only in East Prussia, on the site of the Tannenberg epic, did they succeed in creating a mausoleum of triumphal monumentality for the fallen. At home, far from the fronts where their young men had died, they gave form to their sorrow in church and cathedral monuments that take their inspiration chiefly from the austerity of high Gothic art, often using the image of Grunewald’s Crucifixion or Holbein’s Christ in the Tomb as their theme.4

  The Christ of Grünewald and Holbein is a body that has bled, suffered and died, untended in its final agony by relative or friend. The image was appropriate to the symbolisation of the Great War’s common soldier, for over half of those who died in the west, perhaps more in the east, were lost as corpses in the wilderness of the battlefield. So numerous were those missing bodies that, in the war’s immediate aftermath, it was proposed, first by an Anglican clergyman who had served as a wartime chaplain, that the most fitting of all the memorials to the War dead would be a disinterment and reburial of one of those unidentified in a place of honour. A body was chosen, brought to Westminster Abbey and placed at the entrance under a tablet bearing the inscription, “They buried him among the Kings because he had done good toward God and toward His house.” On the same day, the second anniversary of the armistice of 11 November 1918, a French Unknown Soldier was buried under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and unknown soldiers were later reburied in many of the victor nations’ capitals.5 When the defeated Germans attempted to create a national memorial to their dead in 1924, however, the unveiling broke down into a welter of political protest. The speech made by President Ebert, who had lost two sons, was heard out. The two minutes of silence that was supposed to follow was interrupted by the shouting of pro-war and anti-war slogans, which precipitated a riot that lasted all day.6 The agony of a lost war continued to divide Germany, as it would until the coming of Hitler nine years later. Soon after his assumption of the Chancellorship, Nazi writers began to represent Hitler, the “unknown corporal,” as a living embodiment of the “unknown soldier” Weimar Germany had failed as a state to honour. It was not long before Hitler, in his speeches as Führer of the German nation, began to refer to himself as “an unknown soldier of the world war.” He was sowing the seed that would reap another four million German corpses.7