The War that Caused All Wars
DRAPER, ROGER
Summer Books THE WAR THAT CAUSED ALL WARS By Roger Draper It began in Sarajevo, where a terrorist group under the influence of the Serbian government—which hoped to absorb the Serbs of...
...Twenty per cent of the Austrian soldiers sent to fight Serbia were casualties...
...In September 1914 Berlin issued a list of war aims calling, among other things, for German control of Belgium's coastline...
...It was a disaster, as John Keegan says in The First World War (Knopf, 475 pp., $3 5), that "came out of a cloudless sky, to populations which knew almost nothing of it and had been raised to doubt that it could ever again trouble their continent...
...the author simply takes the September demands and removes German control of the Belgian coast...
...Knowing Serbia was involved in the crime (though to an extent that is still unclear), the Austro-Hungarians not only demanded the prosecution and punishment of any official who had promoted it, but also the participation of their own representatives in the process...
...and were retreating toward their own artillery along, if lucky, intact telephone lines...
...Here too, there is no real documentary evidence...
...The British Empire lost a million dead, France and Russia 1.7 million each, Italy 460,000...
...Moreover, at Germany's surrender, it occupied large parts of Belgium, eastern France and Poland...
...They had no cause for such thoughts after World War II: At its end, the victors conquered, occupied and reconstructed Germany...
...Keegan is more hostile to "aggressive, backward and domestically violent" Serbia than used to be common in English-language books on World War I, and he pays more attention to its course in that "intensely warlike" country than would have made sense until recently...
...In the East, Ferguson suggests, Germany would have contented itself in July 1914 with wresting Poland and the Baltic from Russia...
...Neither France nor Russia had committed itself to that course when it mobilized...
...In those days, military planners had to be transportation specialists...
...no German document substantiates the adoption of the September positions for that reason...
...A protracted war in the East would necessarily have led to more extreme aims of the sort the Germans actually produced by 1916, when they resolved to expel most of the Russian and non-Russian (but not Jewish) inhabitants of the Baltic region and to resettle it with Germans...
...Keegan succeeds at bringing the strategic dimension of World War I to life, but as he says himself, "the chronicle of its battles provides the dreariest literature in military history...
...Germany then warned that it too would do so unless the Tsar backed down...
...Moreover, it arrives at a time when conventional, on-the-page descriptions of warfare are coming to the end of their usefulness: Visually oriented media—even a bad CD-ROM encyclopedia like Encarta—beat text at showing the ebb and flow of battle...
...colonial acquisitions in Central Africa from France and Belgium...
...Serbia, at first disposed to submit, was pushed into rejection by its great ally, Russia...
...Thus did a regional mess in the Balkans evolve by mid-August into a struggle of European magnitude...
...Still, there had been great German victories in the East...
...Germany lost 2 million, Austria-Hungary 1.5 million, and the Turks uncounted hundreds of thousands...
...This too is acceptable to him, because he exaggerates the degree of Britain's rivalry with Russia...
...Yet by early 1915, a front was entrenched on almost 1,300 miles, from the Baltic town of Memel to Czemowitz (currently in Ukraine) in the East, and from Nieuport (Belgium) to the Swiss border in the West...
...Particularly in the United States, there was a tendency to hold all the combatants equally guilty or, worse, to see Germany as less so than Russia...
...The physical remains of about half these men were never found...
...Their system of conscription mobilized...
...But even in this hypothetical reconstruction, Berlin's goals seem more far-reaching to me than they do to him...
...Yet if Ferguson's specific argument fails to persuade, it must be said that the destruction wrought by World War I was so great and so pointless that peace at any price might have been preferable to it...
...The attackers found themselves...
...The air war against Serbia is hardly the first case of combatants failing to anticipate what would really happen...
...When Germany did so, the die was cast because the Schlieffen Plan, Germany's strategy for defeating its enemies on both fronts, called for a lightning attack on France to take it out quickly, followed by a longer struggle against Russia...
...Ferguson harks back to the mood following 1918, when disillusionment with the way the War turned out was widespread...
...Like most earlier offensives, this one was unsuccessful...
...Whether it was right or wrong for Britain to hitch its star to France, Russia and, yes, Serbia and its terrorists, John Keegan points out that the crisis was driven not by any of them but by Germany—above all, the German Army's cardinal principle: Mobilization means war...
...Military science has two dimensions: strategy and tactics...
...World War I stopped so abruptly and mysteriously that the reasons for its conclusion in late 1918 are still debated...
...Most offensives weakened the armies that launched them more than the armies on the other side...
...They would, he grants, have included a high War indemnity to cripple French military power for decades...
...This would have been acceptable, he thinks, because initially German objectives were not extreme ("Napoleonic...
...Only in this way could the German Problem be solved...
...Ferguson tries to sketch out the kind of peace with France, Belgium and Russia that the Germans would have imposed if Britain had accepted Bethmann's July offer...
...But this is an inference...
...a higher proportion of the male population than in any other European country and their soldiers, from boys to old men, were naturally warlike...
...No wonder many Germans believed they had been "stabbed in the back...
...That moved Britain to make good on its treaty obligation to defend Belgian neutrality...
...Insofar as his book deals with those battles, it is, I fear, no exception...
...moving into unknown and confusing surroundings, and away from their supporting artillery the further they advanced...
...When it did, Russia started to mobilize...
...Keegan, who is British, has written a military history and thus does not address such questions as war guilt or whether other countries should have entered the fighting...
...it created the world in which Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao made good...
...As the German ultimatum expired, Russia's ally, France, mobilized as well...
...Of all the participating nations, Serbia endured by far the greatest burden of deaths, civilian and military: 15 per cent of the population, not the 2 to 3 per cent of Britain, France and Germany...
...Even if the attackers managed to brave their way through artillery bombardment to reach the machine gun fire of the enemy front line, writes Keegan, almost immediately "the advantage tended to move toward the defenders, who knew the ground...
...In France and Belgium, the front changed very little over two and a half years, for in 1914 the state of military technology—above all, the machine gun—made the defense more formidable than the offense, particularly on the Western front...
...In any case, German acquisitions in the East would not have come about benignly...
...But even if we have succeeded in bombing the Serbs out of Kosovo, we will never be able to bomb them out of the region...
...Both sides had envisioned movement in their prewar planning...
...The plan failed because Western Europe's railroads and highways could not get the Germans to fronts in Belgium and France fast enough...
...Germany had already promised to support Austria-Hungary if it came to blows with Serbia...
...a European customs union dominated by Germany...
...But, Keegan writes, "if barbarian in the cruelty with which they waged war, [they] were not militarily backward at all...
...Another British writer, Niall Ferguson, makes those essentially political issues his focus in The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (Basic, 563 pp., $30.00...
...The most important question about World War I is why it gave rise to World War II, rightly deemed by Keegan to be "in large measure its continuation," which was in turn followed by two generations of general peace in Europe...
...Germany now declared war on both and soon invaded France through Belgium...
...Early in the year, with Red Russia out of the fighting, the Germans transferred some of the strongest units of their Eastern forces to the Western front for a great War-winning drive forward...
...and German domination of Holland...
...Serbia still awaits its 1945...
...At the moment, the news from the Balkans is encouraging...
...Only a defeat on the order of 1945 would permanently resolve our Serbian problem today, and that would require the country's conquest, occupation and reconstruction...
...Since Ferguson exaggerates the extent of Britain's rivalry with France, he actually believes "these were all goals which were complementary to British interests...
...By then, however, the Germans had used up their last strong card at a time when the Allies had 1.3 million American soldiers at their disposal and 2.7 million more in training...
...Germany might well have knocked France out of the war quickly, but Russia, with its great spaces and willingness to cede territory in the early going, would have taken much more time to defeat...
...Summer Books THE WAR THAT CAUSED ALL WARS By Roger Draper It began in Sarajevo, where a terrorist group under the influence of the Serbian government—which hoped to absorb the Serbs of Bosnia and other parts of Austria-Hungary—assassinated the heir to the Hapsburg throne on June 28,1914...
...Not only did the level of brutalization surpass that of all previous wars combined...
...That requirement, Ferguson concedes, "would indeed have realized [Britain's] 'Napoleonic nightmare.'" Nonetheless, he argues that the demand was precipitated by Britain's entry, because Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, who drew up the September Program, had in July told the British ambassador that Germany would guarantee the territorial integrity of Belgium and France if Britain agreed not to help them...
...Ferguson contends that Britain should have stayed out of the Great War even though, as he admits, Germany might well have won it as a result...
...The Germans and Austrians viewed the Serbs as barbarians...
...After World War II, the most influential historians argued that Germany was responsible not only for that disaster but also for its predecessor...
...The two Wars had such different effects because they ended differently...
Vol. 82 • June 1999 • No. 7
