Chapter 10: History: The First World War
On 28 June 1919, two German officials were driven through the gates of the Palace of Versailles, a few miles outside Paris. They were taken into the Hall of Mirrors, a long room of windows and glass, crowded that day with delegates, officers and photographers. Neither man had written a word of the document waiting on the table. Germany’s representatives had been handed the terms in May and told plainly that there would be nothing to negotiate. The German government that received those terms resigned rather than accept them. The government that replaced it sent Hermann Müller and Johannes Bell, and they signed for Germany that afternoon. The room was not chosen by accident. The German Empire had itself been proclaimed in that same hall in 1871, after France was defeated in war. Nor was the date an ordinary one. Five years earlier to the day, on 28 June 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, had been shot dead in Sarajevo. Between those two June mornings, a quarrel between two European states had drawn in Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Japan and the United States. It had been fought in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and by soldiers recruited from colonies far from the quarrel. How does one killing in a Balkan city become a war of the world? And what did the men in the Hall of Mirrors believe they were building, so that it would not happen a second time?
Diagram
Fig. 10.0-1 Caption: The Treaty of Versailles was signed in the Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the shooting at Sarajevo. Brief: Reproduce a photograph or contemporary illustration of the signing in the Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles. Label the long mirrored wall, the crowded ranks of delegates and observers, and the signing table at the centre. Emphasise how few people are seated at the table compared with the number watching.
10.1 A War Unlike Any Before It
In the summer of 1914 a war began in Europe. Within weeks it had spread well beyond the continent where it started. Fighting took place in Europe, in Asia, in Africa and across the Pacific.
Europe had known plenty of wars before 1914. Most of them were fought by professional armies, over a season or two, on a limited front, for a limited object. This war was different in three ways: how many states were drawn in, how it was fought, and whom it touched.
Who Was Drawn In
By 1914 the major European powers were tied to one another by promises of support. A quarrel between two states therefore could not remain a quarrel between two states. Section 10.4 explains how those promises were made and what they obliged each side to do.
The empires of Europe then carried the war outwards. Britain and France drew soldiers, labourers, money and supplies from their colonies, and Indian troops served in France, in East Africa and in West Asia. States far from the original quarrel — among them Japan and, later, the United States — entered as well.
How It Was Fought
The weapons of 1914 were the products of half a century of industry. Machine guns and heavy artillery made open ground deadly, so armies dug in and fought from long lines of trenches. Submarines attacked shipping, aircraft were used for the first time in a major war, and poison gas was released on the battlefield.
The fighting also reached people who never carried a weapon. Governments directed factories, farms, railways and labour towards the war; food was rationed; enemy ports were blockaded so that supplies could not reach them. Air raids, shortages, epidemics and famine killed civilians in large numbers.
This is what historians mean by total war — a war in which a state turns its whole economy and population towards the fighting, so that the line between soldier and civilian almost disappears. It is the feature that most sharply separates 1914 from the wars that came before it.
What The War Was Called
The people who lived through it did not call it the First World War. To them it was the Great War, because nothing on that scale had happened in living memory. The name we use became usual only after a second world war began in 1939, which made numbering necessary.
That small fact is worth pausing on. A war can only be called ‘the first’ once a second has happened, so the name itself was given by people looking backwards. Names in History are given, not found, and they carry the assumptions of whoever gave them.
How We Know
This war is among the most heavily documented events in human history. Governments exchanged telegrams and signed treaties, newspapers reported daily, photographers worked at the front, soldiers wrote home, and armies kept registers of the dead.
Abundance, however, is not the same as agreement. Wartime newspapers passed through censors, official despatches were written by people who expected to be read later, and the totals of those who fought and died are estimates that still differ from one source to another. A student of History has to ask not only what the record says, but who made it and for whom.
10.2 Nationalism And Imperialism
No single decision caused the First World War. It grew out of conditions that had been building in Europe for forty years or more, and the first of these was the way Europeans had come to think about their own nations.
Nationalism is the sense of unity felt by people who share a common history, language, territory and culture, and who wish to govern themselves. In the nineteenth century it was a creative force in Europe. It helped Italy and Germany, each long divided into many small states, to unite into single nations.
10.2.1 Aggressive Nationalism
In the second half of the nineteenth century, this feeling of unity hardened into something else. Pride in one’s own nation turned into a belief that it was superior to others, and that its interests should be pursued whatever the cost to its neighbours.
Aggressive nationalism is love of one’s own country combined with hostility towards other countries. A nation holding this view judges its own claims as just and its rival’s claims as scheming. It also treats any gain by a neighbour as a loss to itself.
Three examples show how this worked in practice.
France wanted to recover Alsace and Lorraine, the border provinces Germany had taken after defeating her in the war of 1870–71.
Italy wanted Trentino and Trieste, districts on the southern edge of Austria-Hungary where many people spoke Italian.
Serbia, a small independent kingdom in the Balkans, wanted the Slav peoples living under Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman rule to join a single large South Slav state.
Each of these claims was made in the name of the nation, and each could only be satisfied by taking territory from another state. Military strength therefore came to be treated as the measure of national standing. A country that could not defend its claims by force was thought to have lost prestige.
10.2.2 Imperialism And The Scramble For Colonies
The same confidence pushed European states outwards. Imperialism is the policy by which a powerful state establishes control over another country, either by occupying its territory or by controlling its politics and economy from outside. A territory taken and ruled in this way was called a colony, and it was governed either by officials sent from the imperial country or through a ruler who depended on it.
Colonies were wanted for reasons that were mostly economic. They supplied raw materials for factories at home, markets for finished goods, cheap labour, agricultural land and ports along trade routes. They also carried weight of another kind, because a state with a large empire was treated as a great power.
By the end of the nineteenth century Britain and France held the largest empires. British possessions included India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Burma (now Myanmar), Egypt, South Africa, islands in the Caribbean and a broad stretch of Africa. Britain’s control rested on the largest navy in the world, which protected both her trade and her sea routes.
The Latecomers
Germany and Italy had become unified states only in 1871, by which time much of the world had already been claimed. Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States all now sought colonies and spheres of influence in Asia, Africa and the Pacific.
There was very little unclaimed territory left, so each new claim had to be made at some other power’s expense. The competition for Africa in the 1880s and 1890s was the sharpest example, and European governments settled the rules of that competition among themselves at a conference in Berlin in 1884–85. No African ruler was represented there.
Economic rivalry sharpened the political rivalry. By the early twentieth century Germany was producing more steel than Britain, building a merchant fleet to match her trade, and pressing for colonies and markets that Britain and France already held. Each side read the other’s growth as a threat rather than as ordinary commerce.
The way Europeans pictured this competition to themselves is itself evidence. Cartoon 10.1 shows how the division of Africa was drawn in the European press of the period — as a matter settled between gentlemen around a table.
Cartoon
Cartoon 10.1 Caption: European statesmen divide the map of Africa between them at a conference table. Brief: Draw a formal dining table in a panelled room. Around it sit exaggerated figures of European statesmen in uniform and evening dress, each holding a knife or a pen. Spread flat on the table is a large map of Africa, already scored into portions, with a few portions on the plates of the seated figures. Label the map ‘AFRICA’. No African figure is present anywhere in the drawing. Discuss: Who is absent from this table, and how does their absence change what the drawing is saying?
The exaggeration is doing precise work. Placing a continent on a dinner table turns land, people and rulers into a dish to be shared, which is close to how the negotiating powers spoke of Africa in their own documents. The empty chairs are the point of the drawing.
A cartoon, however, argues in one direction and cannot answer back. This one cannot tell us what African rulers did about these claims, which many resisted for years by war and by negotiation, nor how far the tidy lines drawn in Europe matched what actually happened on the ground. For that we need administrative records, treaties and African accounts, not a picture.
10.3 The Race For Armaments
If national standing was to be measured by strength, then strength had to be visible. From the 1870s onwards the states of Europe built weapons at a pace no continent had seen before, and each of them called it self-defence.
Militarism is the belief that a state should keep large armed forces, glorify them, and be ready to settle its disputes by using them. Under its influence, ministers and newspapers came to speak as though international problems had no other solution.
The race gathered speed soon after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, in which the German states defeated France. That war showed how quickly a well-organised army could decide a quarrel, and every major power drew the same lesson from it.
The Logic Of The Spiral
The pattern that followed had a logic of its own. When one state increased its forces, its neighbours felt compelled to match the increase, and their increase then justified the first state in going further.
Each step was defensive when seen from inside, and threatening when seen from outside. Governments could not easily stop, because stopping while a rival continued looked like surrender. The result was not security but a continent filled with apprehension.
Armies also prepared in detail for a war nobody admitted was coming. General staffs drew up mobilisation plans, fixing in advance which units would move, by which railway, on which day. These plans made speed the highest value in a crisis, and they left ministers very little room to pause and negotiate once mobilisation had begun.
The War At Sea
The rivalry was fiercest at sea. Britain’s empire, her trade and her food supply all depended on the world’s largest navy, and British governments treated naval superiority as a matter of survival.
Germany, seeking to protect her colonies in Africa and her islands in the Pacific, and to be treated as an equal, set out to build a fleet that could stand against Britain’s. The Kiel Canal, which links the Baltic Sea to the North Sea across German territory, was deepened and widened so that the largest new battleships could pass through it.
The competition became more intense after Britain launched a new kind of battleship in 1906, carrying heavier guns and steaming faster than anything afloat. Every earlier battleship in every navy was now out of date, so the count of ships effectively restarted, and each side hurried to build the new type. Fig. 10.3-1 shows what these ships looked like.
Diagram
Fig. 10.3-1 Caption: A battleship of the type built during the naval race before 1914. Brief: Side view of an early twentieth-century all-big-gun battleship at sea. Label the armoured hull, the turrets carrying the main guns, the funnels and the control tower. Add a small human figure on the deck, drawn to scale, to convey the size of the vessel.
Industrial capacity lay behind all of this. German shipyards were also turning out the largest passenger liners in the world by 1912, and German mills were producing more steel than British ones. The same factories, docks and skilled workers could build for trade or for war.
A photograph or drawing of a warship, however, only tells us what a country was able to make. It cannot tell us what its ministers intended to do with it, whether the fleet was meant for use or for display, or how the money spent on it was taken from something else. Intentions have to be read from despatches, budgets and debates, and those are far harder to interpret than a hull.
10.4 The Division Of Europe Into Two Camps
Rivalry alone does not make a general war. What turned Europe’s quarrels into a single quarrel was the habit of promising, in advance and in writing, to fight on somebody else’s behalf.
Two Kinds Of State
Europe in the early twentieth century contained two very different kinds of state. On one side were single nation-states such as France, Germany and Holland. A nation-state is a state whose people are held together by a shared language, history and set of traditions, and who think of themselves as one people.
On the other side were multi-national empires, of which Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire were the largest. Austria-Hungary was ruled by the Habsburg dynasty and contained Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Croats and Bosnians, speaking different languages and following different customs. The Russian Empire likewise ruled Poles, Ukrainians, Turkish-speaking and Mongol peoples.
This difference mattered a great deal. In a nation-state, nationalism strengthened the government. In a multi-national empire, the same nationalism threatened to pull the state apart, because each people could ask why it should be ruled from a capital that was not its own.
Map 10.1 shows how Europe was arranged in 1914, and which states stood on which side.
Map
Map 10.1 Caption: Europe in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War. Brief: Political map of Europe as it stood in 1914. Show Great Britain, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Serbia, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Shade the Triple Alliance members in one tone and the Triple Entente members in another; leave neutral states unshaded. Mark Sarajevo. These are the boundaries of 1914 and not of today: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states and modern Turkey do not appear, because they did not then exist as independent states. Label the map clearly as a historical map.
The map makes the two blocs easy to see, and that is exactly why it must be read with care. Shading a country in one colour suggests that its whole population stood behind the alliance, which was not true of the multi-national empires. It also suggests that the two camps were fixed and equal, when in fact the agreements were of different kinds, made at different dates, and some of them were secret.
10.4.1 The Triple Alliance
Germany’s first concern after 1871 was that France would one day try to recover Alsace and Lorraine. To keep France without friends, Germany built a set of alliances of her own.
Germany and Austria-Hungary agreed in 1879 to support each other. Italy joined them in 1882, and the arrangement became known as the Triple Alliance. Its members undertook to come to one another’s aid in defined circumstances, and the text of the treaty was not published.
Italy’s position within it was always uneasy. Her claim to Trentino and Trieste was a claim against Austria-Hungary, her own ally, and she stayed out of the fighting when war came in 1914.
10.4.2 The Triple Entente
After Bismarck’s dismissal, Germany let her understanding with Russia lapse. France seized the opening at once, and the shape of Europe began to change.
France and Russia agreed to support each other in 1894. Britain, long unwilling to tie herself to any continental power, settled her colonial disputes with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907. Those three understandings together formed the Triple Entente of 1907.
An entente is a friendly understanding rather than a binding military alliance, and this distinction is worth holding on to. Britain in 1914 was not obliged by treaty to fight for France in the way that Germany was obliged to support Austria-Hungary.
Elsewhere, Britain had also made an alliance with Japan in 1902, which is why Japanese forces later acted against German possessions in the Pacific and the Far East. Japan was Britain’s ally; she was never a member of the Triple Entente.
By 1914 the effect was plain. Europe had two armed camps, each convinced it was the defensive one, and each aware that a quarrel involving any single member could summon all the rest.
10.5 The Sarajevo Crisis
Aggressive nationalism, imperial rivalry, the race for arms and the two alliance systems had made Europe combustible by 1914. What was still missing was a spark, and it came from the Balkans.
Historians therefore separate two kinds of cause. The long-term causes are the conditions that made a general war possible over many years. The immediate cause is the particular event that set those conditions alight at a particular moment. Neither kind explains the war on its own.
10.5.1 The Assassination At Sarajevo
The Balkans, in the south-east corner of Europe, were the most disturbed region on the continent. Ottoman power there had been shrinking for a century, and the peoples left behind — Serbs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Bosnians, Croats — were forming or enlarging states of their own.
Austria-Hungary annexed the province of Bosnia in 1908. Bosnia held a large Slav population, and Serbia, the neighbouring Slav kingdom, treated the annexation as the seizure of territory that should have joined a South Slav state. Austria-Hungary, for its part, saw Serbia as a standing encouragement to every Slav people inside her own borders.
On 28 June 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was visiting Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. He and his wife were shot dead in the street by Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb.
The weapons and the plan had come from a secret society of extreme Serbian nationalists, known as the Black Hand or the Union of Death, whose declared aim was to bring all Serbs into a single state. How far officials of the Serbian government knew of the plot is a question historians still argue over, because a secret society leaves very little in writing.
Vienna did not wait for that question to be settled. The Austro-Hungarian government treated the killing as an act of Serbian policy, and decided that the moment had come to deal with Serbia once and for all.
10.5.2 From Ultimatum To World War
On 23 July 1914, Austria-Hungary sent Serbia an ultimatum. An ultimatum is a final set of demands with a time limit attached, after which the sender will act. Serbia was given forty-eight hours to reply.
Serbia accepted most of the demands. She refused only those that would have allowed Austro-Hungarian officials to conduct the investigation on Serbian soil, since that would have meant surrendering control of her own courts and police.
Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. Russia, who regarded herself as the protector of the Slav peoples, began to prepare her forces.
Here the alliances did their work. Mobilisation — calling up reserves and moving armies to their war stations by fixed railway timetables — could not easily be halted once begun, and each government read a rival’s mobilisation as a decision for war.
Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August 1914 and on France, Russia’s ally, on 3 August. German troops then entered Belgium on 4 August, in order to reach northern France quickly from the north.
Belgium was a neutral state whose neutrality the European powers, Britain among them, had guaranteed by treaty. Britain demanded the withdrawal of the German troops, and when the demand was refused she declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. Timeline TL 10.1 sets out the thirty-eight days.
The Two Coalitions
Other states joined within months. Japan declared war on Germany and moved against German possessions in the Far East. Turkey entered on Germany’s side towards the end of 1914, and Bulgaria followed later. Italy stayed out at first, and in 1915 entered the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, abandoning the Triple Alliance she had joined in 1882.
The two sides took their lasting names in this period. Britain, France, Russia and those who fought with them were called the Allied Powers. Germany, Austria-Hungary and their partners were called the Central Powers, a name drawn from their position in the middle of Europe.
It is worth asking what the record of these thirty-eight days can and cannot settle. The telegrams, ultimatums and declarations survive in government archives, so the sequence of decisions is beyond dispute.
What they do not show is what any minister privately intended. Governments after 1918 published selected collections of documents to prove that the other side had begun the war, and each collection was assembled with that purpose in mind. The question of responsibility for 1914 has never been closed.
10.6 The Course Of The War
The war that began in August 1914 was expected by many governments to be over within months. It lasted four years and three months, and it was fought in more places, by more people, than any war before it.
10.6.1 The Fronts And The Fighting
The fighting was organised along fronts — long lines where two opposing armies faced each other, often for years at a stretch. The two main fronts lay on either side of Germany.
On the Western Front, German armies swept through Belgium and into northern France in the opening weeks. French and British forces halted them at the Battle of the Marne, named after the river east of Paris near which it was fought. The German plan of knocking France out quickly had failed, and after that neither side could push the other far for nearly four years.
Machine guns and heavy artillery made open ground impossible to cross. Armies therefore dug long lines of trenches, from which they defended their own positions and attacked the other’s. Soldiers lived in these trenches through rain, snow and mud, short of food and sleep, among rats and lice, and exposed to shellfire and to poison gas.
Diagram
Fig. 10.6-1 Caption: A cross-section of a front-line trench system on the Western Front. Brief: Cutaway side view showing the front-line trench with its firing step and sandbagged parapet, a support trench behind it, and a communication trench joining the two. Label the barbed wire in front, the strip of open ground between the opposing lines, and the dugout used for shelter. Keep the drawing diagrammatic and free of casualties.
A diagram like this explains the engineering, and that is all it explains. It cannot show how a trench sounded or smelt, how long men stayed in one, or what the same ground looked like after months of shelling. For that we depend on letters, diaries and photographs, and each of those passed through a censor before it left the front.
On the Eastern Front, fighting began in August 1914 between Russia on one side and Germany and Austria-Hungary on the other. The lines there moved much more than in the west, and Russian armies were driven back with severe losses.
The war reached far outside Europe. The Allied Powers attacked the Ottoman Empire in Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia; Japan took German possessions in East Asia; and Britain and France seized most of the German colonies in Africa.
The War At Sea And The Blockade
This was a war of whole economies, so cutting off supplies mattered as much as winning battles. A blockade is the closing of an enemy’s ports and sea routes so that food, raw materials and war supplies cannot reach it.
Britain used her navy to blockade the German coast. Germany replied with submarines, known as U-boats, which attacked merchant ships and warships without warning. At sea the two navies clashed in the North Sea, and on land the French held the fortress town of Verdun through a long battle in 1916.
10.6.2 The Entry Of The United States
The United States stayed out of the war at first. American opinion was largely sympathetic to Britain and France, but there was little wish to send soldiers to Europe.
In 1915 a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania. Nearly twelve hundred passengers and crew were killed, and 128 of them were Americans. Feeling against Germany hardened sharply after this, and further sinkings kept it high.
Money pulled in the same direction. The Allied Powers had raised very large loans in the United States to pay for arms, food and other goods, and an Allied defeat would have put those loans at risk. A victorious Germany would also have been a formidable commercial rival.
On 6 April 1917 the United States declared war on Germany. Its manpower, industry and finance were now on the Allied side.
10.6.3 The Exit Of Russia
Russia’s war went badly from the start. Her armies were large but poorly supplied, her losses were enormous, and shortages of food and fuel at home turned into open unrest.
In 1917 the imperial government fell, and later that year a Bolshevik government led by Lenin came to power. It issued a Decree on Peace, calling for an end to the war without annexations or indemnities — that is, without the victors taking territory or imposing payments on the defeated.
Russia then made a separate peace with Germany, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, in March 1918. The terms were severe, and Russia gave up extensive territory in the west.
The consequence for the fighting was immediate. Germany no longer had to hold an eastern front, and could move troops across to face the Allies in France.
10.6.4 The End Of The War
Germany’s advantage did not last. Britain, France and the United States launched a sustained offensive from July 1918, using tanks — armoured vehicles able to cross trenches and wire — in growing numbers.
Germany’s partners gave way one after another. Bulgaria withdrew in September 1918, Turkey surrendered in October, and Austria-Hungary signed an armistice on 3 November.
In Germany itself, unrest spread and the government collapsed. Emperor William II left for Holland, Germany was declared a republic, and the new government signed an armistice — an agreement to stop fighting while peace terms are settled — on 11 November 1918.
The guns fell silent that day, but no peace had yet been made. The terms would be settled at a conference the following year, and section 10.7 takes up what was decided there.
10.6.5 The Human And Economic Cost
The numbers are large and they are estimates. Between 53 and 70 million people are thought to have served in the armed forces of the warring states. About nine million of them died, which is roughly one in seven of those who fought, and several million more were left permanently disabled.
Civilians died in air raids, and in far greater numbers from shortage, disease and famine caused by blockade and disruption. An influenza epidemic swept the world in 1918 and 1919, spreading along the routes the war had opened, and killed millions more, India among the worst affected countries.
The economic damage matched the human damage. States had borrowed enormous sums, spent their reserves and directed their industries away from ordinary production for four years. Many historians link the severe worldwide economic depression that began in 1929 to the debts and dislocation left behind by the war.
These figures must be handled carefully. Armies counted their own dead unevenly, some records were destroyed, and civilian deaths from hunger and disease were rarely counted at all. Every total given above is a range or an estimate, and reasonable historians using different records arrive at different figures.
10.7 The Treaty Of Versailles
The armistice of November 1918 stopped the fighting. It did not settle anything else, and the terms on which Europe would live afterwards still had to be written.
10.7.1 The Paris Peace Conference
The victorious powers met from January 1919, first at Versailles just outside Paris and later in Paris itself. Twenty-seven countries were represented at the conference.
Two large groups were absent. The defeated states were not invited to negotiate, and Russia, which had left the war in 1918 and was now governed by a Bolshevik administration, was excluded by the victorious powers.
In practice the terms were settled by a handful of men. Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Britain, and Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France, took the main decisions, with Vittorio Orlando of Italy making a fourth. The basis of the negotiations was Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a statement of war aims he had issued in 1918.
The three leading powers did not want the same thing, and the treaty carries the marks of their disagreement.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919. It settled matters between the Allies and Germany; separate treaties were made with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. German representatives were shown the terms and told there would be no negotiation, and German governments afterwards called it a dictated peace rather than a treaty.
10.7.2 The Terms Of The Treaty
The treaty ran to hundreds of clauses. Its main provisions were these.
Germany was held responsible, with her allies, for the loss and damage caused by the war.
Germany was required to pay reparations — compensation for war damage, paid by a defeated state to the victors. She also had to hand over merchant ships and to supply coal to France, Italy and Belgium for a period of years. The treaty itself did not fix the total sum, which was settled by a commission afterwards and was very large.
The Rhine valley was to be demilitarised, and German territory west of the Rhine was to be occupied by Allied troops for fifteen years.
Alsace and Lorraine went back to France. Eupen and Malmedy went to Belgium, and northern Schleswig to Denmark after a vote of its inhabitants. Danzig became a free port under international supervision, giving Poland access to the sea.
Germany ceded further territory to Poland and to Czechoslovakia, both of them newly independent states.
The coal mines of the Saar were given to France for fifteen years, and the Saar area itself was to be governed by the League of Nations.
Germany lost all her colonies. They were not made independent but placed under mandate — a system by which a victorious power administered a former colony on behalf of the League of Nations and reported to it. Britain, France, Belgium, South Africa, Japan and Portugal received mandates.
German possessions in the Pacific, and the rights Germany had held in China, were transferred to Japan.
The German army was limited to 100,000 men and the navy to 15,000 men with a small listed number of ships. Submarines and military aircraft were forbidden, and compulsory military service was abolished.
Germany recognised the independence of Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the new South Slav kingdom later known as Yugoslavia.
The Covenant of the League of Nations was written into the treaty as its opening section.
10.7.3 The Map Of Europe Redrawn
The peace treaties changed the political map of Europe more thoroughly than any settlement since 1815. Three ruling dynasties had already fallen — the Romanovs in Russia during the war, the Hohenzollerns in Germany and the Habsburgs in Austria-Hungary at its end — and Ottoman rule in Turkey ended soon afterwards.
Austria and Hungary became separate states. Czechoslovakia and the South Slav kingdom emerged as independent countries, and Poland reappeared as a state after more than a century of partition. Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became independent from Russia.
Outside Europe the balance had shifted too. The United States had surpassed Europe economically and militarily, and European supremacy in the world was no longer taken for granted. Map 10.2 shows the new arrangement.
Map
Map 10.2 Caption: Europe after the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920. Brief: Political map of Europe as settled after the First World War. Show Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as independent states, alongside Germany, France, Britain, Italy, the Soviet territories and Turkey. Shade in distinct tones the territory lost by Germany, by Austria-Hungary and by Russia, with a key. Mark Danzig, the Saar, Alsace-Lorraine and the demilitarised Rhineland. These are the boundaries of about 1920 and not of today; label the map clearly as a historical map.
A map of this kind shows the outcome and hides the argument. Every line on it was contested, some were drawn where no single people formed a clear majority, and the new states each contained minorities who now lived under a government not their own. The map cannot show that, and the disputes those lines left behind ran on through the following decades.
10.8 The League Of Nations
The most ambitious result of the war was not a boundary or a payment. It was an attempt to change the way states dealt with one another altogether.
10.8.1 The Formation Of The League
Four years of fighting had convinced many political leaders that the old system had failed. Secret alliances, competitive armament and the absence of any place to take a quarrel had allowed a local dispute to become a general war within five weeks.
Wilson’s Fourteen Points had proposed a remedy: an international organisation of states, pledged to preserve peace and to guarantee the independence of its members. The other victorious powers accepted the idea, though not always with enthusiasm.
The Covenant — the founding document setting out the League’s aims, membership and procedures — was written into the Treaty of Versailles as its opening section. The League of Nations came into being in 1920 as a world organisation of independent states, with its headquarters at Geneva in Switzerland.
Its working parts were simple. An Assembly, in which every member state sat, met once a year; a Council of the leading powers together with some smaller states met more often; and a permanent secretariat at Geneva carried on the daily work.
10.8.2 The Objectives Of The League
The Covenant set out what the League existed to do. Its main objectives were these.
All states of the world were prohibited from entering into secret treaties and alliances.
Member states were not to maintain huge armies, warships and destructive armaments.
All states were to respect one another’s independence.
Members were to refer their mutual disputes, if any, to the League for peaceful settlement.
Members were to take the action directed by the League against any state that disturbed world peace and order.
Besides its political functions, the League was to promote cultural, social and economic cooperation among member states.
Read together, these objectives answer the causes set out earlier in this chapter almost point by point. Secret treaties had hidden who was bound to whom; heavy armament had made every state fear its neighbour; and there had been no forum in which Austria-Hungary and Serbia could have been made to argue instead of fight.
The Covenant also laid down what was to happen when a dispute arose. FC 10.1 sets out that procedure.
Flowchart
FC 10.1 — How A Dispute Was To Be Settled Under The Covenant Caption: The procedure the Covenant laid down for quarrels between member states. Nodes: Dispute arises between members → members undertake not to go to war before submitting it → matter referred to arbitration or to the Council → Council investigates and recommends a settlement → if the parties accept, the dispute ends → if a member goes to war in defiance of the Covenant, all members are to break off trade and financial dealings with it → if economic pressure fails, the Council may recommend military measures → but each member government decides for itself whether to supply forces.
10.8.3 Who Joined And Who Stayed Out
An organisation meant to speak for the world had to contain the world, and this one did not.
Germany and the Soviet Union were kept out for years, Germany being admitted only in 1926. Yet a settlement in Europe that excluded the largest defeated state and the largest state on the continent was unlikely to hold.
The United States never joined at all. Wilson had done more than anyone to design the League, but the American Senate refused to approve the treaty, and the country returned to staying out of European commitments.
India presents a different case. India was not independent in 1920, and was nevertheless made a member of the League, her delegates being chosen by the British authorities rather than by any Indian electorate.
The rise of dictatorships in Italy and Germany during the 1920s and 1930s tested that machinery and found it wanting. The League failed in its basic object of keeping the peace, and it was effectively finished when the German invasion of Poland began the Second World War in 1939. Chapters 11 and 12 take up those events.
Its record, however, should not be reduced to a single word. The League settled several smaller disputes peacefully, and its work on health, labour conditions and refugees continued and was later carried into the United Nations. What it could not do was restrain a great power determined on war, which is precisely the task it had been built for.
10.9 Summary
The war that began in Europe in 1914 spread to Asia, Africa and the Pacific and lasted until November 1918. It was called the Great War by those who lived through it, and became the First World War only after a second one began in 1939.
It differed from earlier wars in scale, in method and in reach. Governments turned whole economies towards the fighting, blockades and air raids struck civilians, and colonies supplied soldiers, money and materials. This is what is meant by total war.
Nationalism, a creative force in nineteenth-century Europe, hardened into aggressive nationalism — pride in one’s own nation joined to hostility towards others.
- France sought the return of Alsace and Lorraine, taken by Germany after the war of 1870–71.
- Italy claimed Trentino and Trieste from Austria-Hungary.
- Serbia wanted the Slavs under Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman rule joined in one South Slav state.
Imperialism set the powers against one another. Colonies were wanted for raw materials, markets, cheap labour, land, ports and prestige. By about 1890 little was left unclaimed, so every new gain had to be taken from a rival, and trade rivalry turned into political hostility.
Militarism produced a race for armaments after 1870–71. Each state armed for defence, each increase frightened its neighbours, and detailed mobilisation plans made speed more important than negotiation once a crisis began. The naval rivalry between Britain and Germany was the sharpest instance.
Europe divided into two armed camps.
- The Triple Alliance bound Germany and Austria-Hungary from 1879, with Italy joining in 1882.
- The Triple Entente linked France, Russia and Britain by 1907, though an entente was a looser understanding than an alliance.
The immediate cause was the Sarajevo crisis. Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to Austria-Hungary, was shot dead at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by a Bosnian Serb armed by a secret Serbian nationalist society.
Austria-Hungary’s ultimatum of 23 July was only partly accepted, and war followed within days. The alliances then drew in Russia, Germany, France and — when German troops crossed neutral Belgium — Britain, all within thirty-eight days of the assassination.
Britain, France, Russia and their partners were the Allied Powers; Germany, Austria-Hungary and theirs were the Central Powers. Japan, Turkey, Bulgaria, Italy and, in 1917, the United States entered later.
The fighting settled into fronts, with trench warfare in the west, more movement in the east, and campaigns in West Asia, Africa and the Pacific. Blockade and submarine warfare made supply as decisive as battle, and helped bring the United States into the war. Russia left it after the revolution of 1917 and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918. Germany signed an armistice on 11 November 1918.
The cost is measured in estimates rather than exact figures — some nine million military dead out of perhaps 53 to 70 million who served, millions of civilian deaths from raids, shortage, disease and famine, and economies burdened with debt for decades.
The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, was decided by the victorious powers, chiefly Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, with Germany given no part in the negotiation. It fixed responsibility for the war on Germany and her allies, imposed reparations, took away her colonies and border territories, demilitarised the Rhineland and limited her forces.
The peace treaties redrew the map of Europe. Three dynasties had fallen, Austria and Hungary separated, and Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland and the Baltic states appeared as independent countries.
The Covenant of the League of Nations formed the opening section of the treaty, and the League came into being in 1920 with its headquarters at Geneva. Its objectives were to end secret treaties, limit armaments, protect the independence of states, settle disputes peacefully, act together against an aggressor, and promote cultural, social and economic cooperation.
The League could recommend but not compel. The United States never joined, Germany and the Soviet Union were excluded for years, and members decided for themselves whether to act. It settled some smaller disputes and did lasting work on health, labour and refugees, but it could not restrain a great power set on war.
10.10 Key Terms
- Aggressive nationalism — love of one’s own country joined to hostility towards other countries and to claims on their territory.
- Allied Powers — Britain, France, Russia and the states that fought alongside them in the First World War.
- Armistice — an agreement between the fighting sides to stop the fighting while the terms of peace are settled.
- Blockade — the closing of an enemy’s ports and sea routes so that food, raw materials and war supplies cannot reach it.
- Central Powers — Germany, Austria-Hungary and the states that fought alongside them, so called from their position in the middle of Europe.
- Colony — a territory taken and ruled by another country, governed by officials it sends or through a ruler who depends on it.
- Covenant — the founding document of the League of Nations, setting out its aims, membership and procedures.
- Front — a long line along which two opposing armies face each other, often for months or years at a stretch.
- Immediate cause — the particular event that sets long-standing conditions alight at a particular moment.
- Imperialism — the policy by which a powerful state controls another country, by occupying its territory or by controlling its politics and economy from outside.
- Mandate — an arrangement by which a victorious power administered a former colony on behalf of the League of Nations and reported to it.
- Militarism — the belief that a state should keep large armed forces, glorify them, and be ready to settle disputes by using them.
- Mobilisation — calling up reserves and moving armies to their war stations, usually by fixed railway timetables prepared in advance.
- Nationalism — the sense of unity felt by people who share a common history, language, territory and culture, and who wish to govern themselves.
- Nation-state — a state whose people are held together by a shared language, history and set of traditions, and who think of themselves as one people.
- Reparations — compensation for war damage, paid by a defeated state to the victors.
- Total war — a war in which a state turns its whole economy and population towards the fighting, so that the line between soldier and civilian almost disappears.
- Triple Alliance — the alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary of 1879, joined by Italy in 1882.
- Triple Entente — the understanding linking France, Russia and Britain by 1907, looser in its obligations than a formal alliance.
- Ultimatum — a final set of demands with a time limit attached, after which the sender will act.
10.11 Points to Ponder
Every government in 1914 insisted that it was acting in self-defence. If that was sincerely believed on both sides, can responsibility for the war be fixed on any one state at all?
The alliances of 1879 and 1907 were made to prevent war, by making an attack too costly to attempt. Why did an arrangement designed to deter a war end up spreading one?
A war can be called ‘the first’ only once a second has happened. What does that tell you about who names an event in history, and when?
The Treaty of Versailles required Germany to accept responsibility before reparations could be demanded of her. Is an admission worth anything when the party making it has been given no chance to argue?
The League of Nations could recommend action but could not compel any member to take it. Could a body of independent states ever be given real power to compel, and still leave its members independent?
The number of people who died in this war is given as a range, not a figure, because the records are uneven. When the evidence allows only a range, what should a historian write, and what should a textbook print?
10.12 Objective Questions
- The policy by which a powerful state establishes control over another country, by occupying its territory or by controlling its politics and economy from outside, is called [1 mark]
- Nationalism
- Imperialism
- Militarism
- Mobilisation
- Italy joined Germany and Austria-Hungary to form the Triple Alliance in the year [1 mark]
- 1871
- 1879
- 1882
- 1907
- Assertion (A): Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. [1 mark] Reason (R): German troops entered Belgium, whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed by treaty.
- Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).
- Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).
- is true but (R) is false.
- is false but (R) is true.
- Assertion (A): Britain was not bound by any treaty to send an army to fight for France in 1914. [1 mark] Reason (R): The Triple Entente was a set of friendly understandings rather than a binding military alliance.
- Both (A) and (R) are true, and (R) is the correct explanation of (A).
- Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).
- is true but (R) is false.
- is false but (R) is true.
- Match each person in Column A with the correct description in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Woodrow Wilson | i. Prime Minister of Britain at the Paris Peace Conference |
| b. Georges Clemenceau | ii. Chief minister who united the German states and kept France isolated |
| c. Lloyd George | iii. President of the United States who put forward the Fourteen Points |
| d. Otto von Bismarck | iv. Prime Minister of France, who pressed for terms that would leave Germany unable to attack again |
- Fill in the blanks. [1 mark]
- The heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated at ______, the capital of Bosnia, on 28 June 1914.
- The ______ of the League of Nations was written into the Treaty of Versailles as its opening section.
- State whether each statement is true or false. [1 mark]
- The United States was a member of the League of Nations from its beginning in 1920.
- India was made a member of the League of Nations although she was not then independent.
- Under the Treaty of Versailles, the coal mines of the Saar were given for fifteen years to [1 mark]
- Belgium
- France
- Denmark
- Poland
10.13 Check Your Concepts
Define aggressive nationalism. [2 marks]
Name the three members of the Triple Entente and state the year in which it was completed. [2 marks]
Differentiate between an alliance and an entente, with reference to Europe before 1914. [3 marks]
Give three reasons why industrial nations of the nineteenth century valued colonies. [3 marks]
Explain, with an example, how the race for armaments made war more likely, even though every state described its own armament as defensive. [4 marks]
Trace the chain of events from the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum of 23 July 1914 to the British declaration of war on 4 August 1914. [4 marks]
State any five terms of the Treaty of Versailles that affected Germany. [5 marks]
Describe the formation and the objectives of the League of Nations, and explain why it was unable to achieve its basic object of preventing war. [6 marks]
10.14 Show Your Skills
- Study the description of the cartoon given below and answer the questions that follow. [6 marks] A cartoon of about 1910 shows a high brick wall running down the middle of the drawing. On each side stands a statesman in uniform, and behind each of them is a growing heap of guns, shells and model warships. Each man is peering over the wall at the other’s heap, and each has one hand raised in a gesture of peace. A signboard on each side of the wall reads ‘FOR DEFENCE ONLY’.
- Which cause of the First World War is the cartoonist commenting on? Give one detail from the description that tells you so.
- Explain why each statesman could sincerely believe his own heap was defensive and his rival’s was threatening.
- State one thing this cartoon cannot tell you about the governments it is drawing.
- A city museum sets up a gallery on the years 1900 to 1920. It displays four items: a builder’s plate from a battleship launched in 1911; a printed copy of the Covenant of the League of Nations; a photograph of the delegates at the Paris Peace Conference; and a political map of Europe dated 1914. [6 marks]
- Which cause of the war does the builder’s plate illustrate, and how?
- The Covenant was written into which treaty? State any two objectives of the League of Nations.
- The photograph shows the delegates who settled the peace terms. Name any two of the leaders who took the main decisions, and state one important group that was absent from the conference.
- The five events below are given out of order. [5 marks] Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia · Italy joins Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance · Austria-Hungary sends an ultimatum to Serbia · the Treaty of Versailles is signed · the League of Nations begins work.
- Arrange the five events in chronological order, giving the year of each.
- Explain how the annexation of Bosnia contributed to the crisis of 1914.
- Which of these five events was settled without the participation of the state most affected by it, and why did that matter afterwards?