Anti-War and Anti-Woman

My latest read is a French novel (recently out in a new English translation in one of those nice trade paperback editions but out by NYRB), Fear: A Novel of World War I by Gabriel Chevallier. Fear was one of the rash of war novels that came out around 1930. Twelve years after the end of the first war, and nine before the beginning of the second, a number of blistering anti-war novels and memoirs came out, in part a reaction to an understanding of the war which had, in the eyes of the veterans writing these novels, been too heroic and too nationalistic. These novels emphasized the futility and brutality of the war, and the estrangement which it caused between those who fought and those back home. Probably the most famous of these was Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, but within France, Chevallier's Fear, which came out the same year, caused its own significant stir.

There's a lot interesting going on in the novel, but the part that I read tonight which struck me takes places when the main character has been wounded and is spending time in a hospital. There he's well taken care of a a group of young nurses who take an interest in him, even though he's a private, because he is a student and self consciously intellectual.

There's a trope, certainly in English and American war novels that I've read, of women as being those who see through the hypocrisy of war and object to the waste of life. I hadn't thought about how used I am to this trope until I found Chevallier taking the opposite approach: in this scene he describes women as being the ones upholding the bourgeois and sentimental mentality which he thinks enables war.

Such are our most frequent topics of conversation. They lead us, inevitably, to define our notion of happiness, our ambitions, the goals of humanity, the summits of thought, even god and religion. We re-examine the old laws of humanity, laws created for interchangeable minds, for the whole flock of bleating minds. We discuss every article of her morality, the morality which has guided the endless procession of little souls down through the ages, indistinct little souls which twinkled like glow-worms in the darkness of the world, and were extinguished after one night of life. Today we offer our own feeble light, which isn't even enough for us.

Through my questions, I lead the nurses into traps of logic, and ensnare them in syllogisms that completely undermine their principles. They struggle like flies in a spider's web, but refuse to surrender to the mathematical rigour of reason. They are led by the sentiments that a long passage of generations, ruled by dogma, has incorporated into the very substance of their being -- sentiments that they have got from a line of women, housewives and mothers, who were alive in their early years and then crushed by domestic drudgery, worn out by the daily round, who crossed themselves with holy water to exorcise any thoughts they might have.

They are surprised to learn that duty, as they understand it, can be opposed to other duties, that there are seditious ideas vaster and more elevated than theirs, and which could be more beneficial to humanity.

Nonetheless, Mademoiselle Bergniol declared:

'No son of mine will be brought up to think like you.'

'I know that, mademoiselle. You could bear flaming torches as well as babies, but you'll only give your son the guttering candle that you were given; its wax is dripping and burning your fingers. It is candles like that which have set the world ablaze instead of illuminating it. Blind men's candles, and you can be sure taht tomorrow they'll relight the braziers that will consume the sons of your loins. And their pain will be nothing but ash, and at the moment their sacrifice is consummated, they will know this and will curse you. With your principles, if the occasion presents itself, then you in turn will be inhuman mothers.'
...
When Mademoiselle Bergniol has gone, Negre, who was following our conversation, shared his opinion:

'The delicate little dears! What they need is a hero in their beds, a real live hero with a bloody face, to make them squeal with pleasure!'

'They don't know...'

'They don't know anything, I agree. When all's said and done, women -- and I've known plenty of them -- are females, stupid and cruel. Behind all their airs and graces, they are just wombs. What will they have done during the war? They'll have egged on men to go and get their heads blown off. And the men who will have disembowelled lots of the enemy will receive their reward: the love of a charming, right-thinking young woman. What sweet little bitches!'

It's a toxic mixture, I suppose, of a couple different trends I've seen, reading a bit of French stuff from the late 19th and early 20th century. It's fairly common to see women presented as less capable of the intellectualism which is seen as quintessentially French. (There's a political analog to this in that France had a very early universal voting franchise for men, but was fairly late to give the vote to women.) There's also a tendency to portray women as the keepers of family and domestic culture, and since Chevallier is writing about his sense of alienation from mainstream culture, indeed from everyone who hasn't both experienced war in the trenches and reacted to it in the same way that he has, women are an obvious target since none of them have experienced the war as soldiers.

World War One Reparations Weren't As Unfair As You Think

I've got a history piece up today at The Federalist about (what else) World War One.

One hundred years later, World War I still provokes confusion and controversy. Scholars can’t even agree on who started the war, with major books accusing Russia,France, Britain, and Austria and Germany. If no one knows who started it, everyone agrees how it ended: A vengeful France and Britain imposed massive and unpayable reparations on Germany resulting in the collapse of the German economy and the rise of the Nazi Party.

This view owes its popularity to none other than economist John Maynard Keynes. Before he was duking it out with Friedrich Hayek over questions of recession and economic stimulus, Keynes served as a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. Frustrated that he failed to find support for his proposals to rebuild the European economy, Keynes resigned halfway through the conference and wrote a book entitled “The Economic Consequences of the Peace,” in which he argued that the Versailles Treaty was a “Carthaginian Peace” which would impoverish Germany and Europe, leading to another war. It rapidly became a bestseller in Europe and America, leading to disillusion with the treaty in the English-speaking world.

It’s a good time to challenge conventional wisdom on the war, and that includes asking: Was the Versailles Treaty really so unfair, and did it actually cause World War II?

Read the whole thing...

The Day The Great War Began (Sort Of)

Various venues are covering today as the 100th anniversary of the start of World War One. An interesting aspect of the war is that it's debatable whether this is actually the right date. Or to put it another way: Whether you count July 28th, 1914 as the day on which the Great War began has to do with how you define your terms.

On July 28th, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, after declaring themselves unsatisfied with Serbia's not-quite-complete capitulation to an ultimatum Austria-Hungary had sent on the 23rd. Austro-Hungarian gunboats on the Danube shelled Belgrade to show that the declaration was serious, but then for several days very little happened. Austria-Hungary and Serbia had both mobilized, but the Hapsburg military was so ponderous in its mobilization that it was a week until the first battle between Serbia and Austria-Hungary.

Russia had begun mobilizing its armies in response to the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war, but did not cross the border. On July 31st Germany demanded that Russia stop mobilizing, and when Russia failed to do so, Germany declared war on Russia on August 1st.

On August 2nd Germany invaded Luxembourg in order to use it as a staging ground for its invasion of France. On that same day, a single German cavalry patrol crossed into France and exchanged fire with four French border guards, resulting in the first deaths on the Western Front.

On August 3rd Germany declared war on France, and Belgium refused a German demand to allow its armies to pass through on the way to invade France.

Finally, on August 4th Germany invaded Belgium and Great Britain, as a result, declared war on Germany.

The war thus took a full week to fully start. Up until Germany attacked France and Belgium, there was still a possibility of the war remaining a regional conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, though Russia's mobilization suggests that it might have intervened eventually even in such a local conflict.

French heavy cavalry mobilize in 1914.

The Great Steampunk War

The Atlantic is running a great series on World War One in pictures. One of the fascinating things you see in these pictures is the fascinating mix of old and new technology.

For instance, these American soldiers are using an acoustic locator to find faraway aircraft. The horns collect faint sounds, like the sound of an airplane engine. An operator listens on a headset, moving the direction of the apparatus. The distant sounds become louder when the sound receivers are more directly pointed at the source of the noise, and so by moving the apparatus until the sound it as its loudest the operator can locate the source of the noise. This represented the best technology for locating too-far-to-see aircraft up until the invention of radar during World War II.

The military use of radio was in its infancy during the war. Here two members of a German communications squad power a radio transmitter by pedaling a tandem bicycle generator.

Airplane cockpits were still open, causing aviators to struggle against wind as well as cold. This German pilot is wearing a mask and heated suit.

Poison gas is one of the most famous evils of the war. The horror of it was such that it was banned by international convention after the war and has not been used in major wars between great powers since. Here, German storm troops move through a cloud of poison gas.

Bicycle troops were expected to be a key means of exploiting modern technology to cover distance quickly, though they ended up being of limited use once static warfare set in. These are Belgian bicycle troops at the beginning of the war.

Airplanes were increasingly used for observation, but it was difficult to get real-time communication from them. Radios were bulky for the small, light airplanes of the time. As a result artillery observation (which required immediate observation and feedback to the gunners) was often carried out via static balloons such as this one. They were tethered with cables that allowed them to be raised and lowered. One or more observers would get into the gondola and then use a field telephone (also wired) to call down observations. Stationary balloons, however, made a great target for airplanes, and one of the precursors for a major attack was often to shoot down all the enemy observation balloons, thus reducing their ability to spot troop movements and call in artillery direction. In this photo you can see a motorcycle soldier in the foreground, and an observation balloon behind.

Machine guns did horrible execution during the war (though it was artillery which truly ruled the battlefields). During the latter half of the war light machine guns became more common -- not light in an objective since, as they still weighted fifteen to thirty pounds, but light in the sense that they could be carried on the move by one man. However, the primary workhorse remained the tripod-mounted, water-cooled .30 machine gun. These could weigh upwards of a hundred pounds and thus there was the problem of how to move them around. The mixture of solutions underlines the strange mix of old and modern which characterizes the period:

Art, Truth and the Great War

2014 is the hundredth anniversary of the Great War, which raged from July 28, 1914 through November 11th, 1918. The war is widely regarded as the starting point of the 20th century and it's legacy remains controversial. At the beginning of this year, British Secretary of Education Michael Gove gave an interview in which he complained that the war had become unrealistically stereotyped in the popular imagination be television portrays such as the satirical Blackadder Goes Forth. Art columnist Jonathan Jones rejoined in The Guardian, demanding to know if Gove was going to accuse the art produced during the war of being mere anti-war propaganda. He says:

The centenary of the outbreak of the first world war has kicked off with a fight. Self-styled patriots and provocative military historians claim that our image of the war that killed eight million men between 1914 and 1918, and left 22 million wounded, has been distorted by poets and TV comedy writers. Wilfred Owen and Blackadder have apparently conned us into thinking the great war was futile, when in reality it was a "just" war provoked by German aggression.

The pettiness of this rightwing revisionists' saloon-bar view of modern history is so tragicomic it is tempting to just go and watch Blackadder to calm down. But clearly it needs refuting.
...
Even without that foreknowledge, the people who defined the war as inhuman and beyond any meaningful justification were not Blackadder and Baldrick – they were the soldiers and civilians who endured it. If the eloquence of the war poets is now to be discounted as sentimental, will art be accepted as evidence?

Michael Gove needs to get to Tate Britain quick and censor its pictures. What if children were to take their view of the first world war from William Orpen's painting Zonnebeke? They might think that its despairing image of muddy, meaningless battlefield devastation is somehow the truth of the war. Instead, kids should be looking at propaganda posters I suppose.

Orpen painted this dismal view of war's landscape in 1918. Two years later, Charles Sargeant Jagger cast a bronze image of soldiers suffering in No Man's Land. They hang on the wire as if crucified. Jagger was no pacifist. His memorial, on view at Tate Britain, reflects how everyone involved, left and right, saw this war – as an inexplicable tragedy.

Art has an outsize influence on our view of the Great War. In one sense, that as the still scarred battlefields are all that is left at this point, when all those who participated in the struggle are dead. Another reason is that the Great War produced some truly amazing writing, poetry and art -- much more so that other wars before or after. Poet Ian McMillan writes at the BBC about how Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" has to a great extent defined the war in the minds of people since the poem achieved a renewed prominence in the 1960s. This is not unjustified. Owen's poem is short and devastating:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Owen, who died in the very last days of the war, can be seen as a sort of spokesman for the "lost generation" who left their bodies or their sanity in the trenches. Shouldn't a voice like that be taken as the final authority on the war?

Owen was a very good poet, and the horrors he described are real. But the sense of futility he felt was certainly not shared by all soldiers in the war. I've been finishing up a book published in 1918 A Solder Unafraid, which is composed of letters that Andre Cornet-Auquier (who started the war as a reserve lieutenant in the French army and died in 1916 as a captain) wrote to his family. Cornet-Auquier also writes about the horrors of combat:

July 13, 1915: At eight o’clock the inevitable happened; the fatal shell struck us like a waterspout. It was a big 130 and burst at a yard and a half from where we were, killing wounding and destroying everything and everybody almost. The death rattle of the dying and the shrieks of the wounded in the midst of clouds of smoke and dirt; it was simply horrible. We had five killed among whom was the commander of the battalion, five wounded and four untouched, I being one of these last. A telephonist was killed so close to me that my cap which had been knocked off was filled with the poor fellow's blood. Two of my subordinate officers were killed, but my cyclist was unhurt. As the shells kept on coming, we took advantage of the cloud which enveloped and hid us to stealthily decamp, one after the other, from this veritable hell. Our faces and hair were full of earth and blackened, our temples were running with perspiration, in fact we no longer looked like human beings. What a day. And it means furthermore the battalion without a head, a very heavy inheritance for me to assume.

But he retains a strong sense of purpose about the war, despite a several times repeat premonition that he will die in it. Here's part of a letter he wrote to his father (a protestant minister) in response to hearing that some in the congregation were questioning whether the war was worthwhile:

December 22 [1915] If I had a chance to address a Christian audience, or one calling itself such, this is about what I would say:

You believe in, or profess to believe in, God, in a God who is a Father. You have faith in His justice in His great kindness. You hold that nothing happens without His willing it, and this will is essentially holy, good and wise. Such being the case, you should have confidence in God and await with patience whatever comes to pass. Say to yourself that Justice will triumph, and that Right will finally vanquish brute force, because God has so willed it, because He so wishes it and because He will always continue to so wish it. The cause of Justice and Right is His cause and is ours. It is to us, the allied armies, that He has confided the task of making this cause triumph. It is we therefore who will be victorious in this struggle. When? How? I cannot say, and after all it matters little when and how. The final result is what counts. Don’t fear therefore, but believe. Stop being anxious and nervous; check all recrimination; cease every criticism. Don’t say: “If I were only Joffre or the Prime Minister!” You are not, thank God, either Joffre or Briand. If you tremble, it is because you do not believe in the final victory of Justice and Right, in the triumph of the cause of God on earth. Be logical then and say that God is not God and that for the past twenty centuries the world has deceived itself in believing in the law of love proclaimed by Jesus for, like Him, it is for love that the splendid soldiers of France die, and those of England, Belgium, Servia and Russia, too.

Soldiers who fought and suffered in the war were, like any other group of people, persons with a range of ideas and reactions to their experiences. A soldier like Andre Cornet-Auquier, who believed the war to be a just defense against German aggression, is no less worth remembering than Wilfred Owen, who came to see the struggle as futile.

Tolstoy and The Battle of the Will

On audiobook, I've been wrapping up re-reading War & Peace, while in print I've been reading David Herrmann's The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War, which is about the developments in military technology, army organization, tactics and the arms race in Europe during 1904-1914 and to what extent these led to the outbreak of World War One.

One of the things for which World War One is well known is that, at the opening, generals on both sides were deeply convinced that the essential means of winning a battle was the spirited attack. Making spirited attacks in the face of machine guns and rapid firing artillery could have deeply horrific results, and the resulting learning process has led, in retrospect, to the view of the Great War as being typified by useless slaughter.

French officer machine gunned down in a counterattack at Verdun - 1916
Bilderdienst Süddeutscher Verlag, Munich
Stepan, Photos that Changed the World, p. 31

The common wisdom is that in 1914 military leaders did not realize how much these new weapons had changed the modern battlefield. In actuality, staff colleges and military theorists had spent a great deal of time thinking about the impact of magazine fed rifles, quick firing artillery and machine guns on infantry tactics, but because there had not been a major European war since the wars of German unification in the 1860-70s, there was a great deal of difference of opinion as to what these changes would actually look like.

The American Civil War was nearly unstudied in Europe, partly because it was fought at almost exactly the same time as the very different Franco-Austrian, Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars, and partly because tacticians believed that the conditions in America (which lacked the universal conscription and large trained armies of Europe and had a theater of operations far more vast than Western Europe) would not apply in a European war. Based on the European wars of 40 years before and on the recent Russo-Japanese war, European military leaders were convinced that the key to victory on the modern battlefield was to have a well trained army imbued with sufficient national zeal to carryout a rapid attack even in the face of murderous fire, under which the natural human reaction was to hunker down under cover.

The Japanese suffered terrible casualties in 1904 and 1905, but ultimately their assaults went in to decide the day. Against the almost incomprehensible passivity of the Russian command, the Japanese won repeated victories with an aggressive strategy and a willingness to sacrifice men at decisive points. The victors throughout the second half of the nineteenth century had accomplished all this in spite of a continual increase in the lethality of weapons. The results tended to silence critics of the offensive, and to confirm the axiom that only the attack could bring victory.

Military theory provided a continuous accompaniment to this development. Not only did it enthrone the virtues of the offensive; it tended increasingly to transfer the debate from the realm of the material, technical considerations to that of morale, will, and the interaction between people. The wars of the French Revolution had shown what an influence popular enthusiasm and political ides could have, not only upon recruitment and mobilization of society for war, but also upon fighting effectiveness. Napoleon himself had said that in war the moral is to the material as three is to one, a maxim that his disciples never tired of quoting.... The visionary French officer, Charles Jean-Jacques Joseph Ardant du Picq, took up this theme in the 1860s, writing that a battle was more a contest of will than anything else, and that it was much less important to inflict material losses than to persuade the enemy that he was beaten. To achieve this, du Picq believe in sacrificing everything to the aw-inspiring momentum of an attack. Colmar von der Goltz, the influential German author of many works on strategy after the wars of unification, perpetuated these ideas. For him, to defend was to let the enemy decide where, when and how the battle would be fought. It was also to sacrifice the inestimable advantage in morale that an advancing army enjoyed over a retreating one. All of these ideas conformed well with those of popular nationalist writers in the Mazzinian and later Trietschkean traditions, who placed voluntarism and the power of feelings, especially experienced as a community, above mundane material constraints. The sociological, political and psychological theory of thinkers like Nietzsche, Sorel, Weber, Durkheim and Freud contributed to this preoccupation with will and emotion in a world that seemed to many by the turn of the century to have fallen prey to dehumanizing materialism.
The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War, pages 22-23

(If it seems disconnected from the everyday to cite Nietzsche in a discussion of battlefield tactics, here's an interesting fact I've run into: The second most frequently carried book, after the bible, by German soldiers in World War One was Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.)

The day after reading this section, I read the following section in War & Peace, and suddenly all Tolstoy's criticisms of the "German rationalism" of Russia's generals back in 1812 fell into place. War & Peace was published in 1869, just as the thinking above was coming into currency. And to Tolstoy, the emphasis placed fifty years before on tactics and movement was absurdly theoretical and failed to realize that battle was primarily a contest of wills. Here is Prince Andre (in the online translation, Andrew) presenting what from the narration elsewhere seems clearly to be Tolstoy's view of how war works in Book 10, Chapter 25:

Pierre looked at him in surprise.

"And yet they say that war is like a game of chess?" he remarked.

"Yes," replied Prince Andrew, "but with this little difference, that in chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are not limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is always stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than one, while in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes weaker than a company. The relative strength of bodies of troops can never be known to anyone. Believe me," he went on, "if things depended on arrangements made by the staff, I should be there making arrangements, but instead of that I have the honor to serve here in the regiment with these gentlemen, and I consider that on us tomorrow's battle will depend and not on those others.... Success never depends, and never will depend, on position, or equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position."

"But on what then?"

"On the feeling that is in me and in him," he pointed to Timokhin, "and in each soldier."

Prince Andrew glanced at Timokhin, who looked at his commander in alarm and bewilderment. In contrast to his former reticent taciturnity Prince Andrew now seemed excited. He could apparently not refrain from expressing the thoughts that had suddenly occurred to him.

"A battle is won by those who firmly resolve to win it! Why did we lose the battle at Austerlitz? The French losses were almost equal to ours, but very early we said to ourselves that we were losing the battle, and we did lose it. And we said so because we had nothing to fight for there, we wanted to get away from the battlefield as soon as we could. 'We've lost, so let us run,' and we ran. If we had not said that till the evening, heaven knows what might not have happened. But tomorrow we shan't say it! You talk about our position, the left flank weak and the right flank too extended," he went on. "That's all nonsense, there's nothing of the kind. But what awaits us tomorrow? A hundred million most diverse chances which will be decided on the instant by the fact that our men or theirs run or do not run, and that this man or that man is killed, but all that is being done at present is only play. The fact is that those men with whom you have ridden round the position not only do not help matters, but hinder."

As with many a wrong theory, this is of course quite a bit of truth in this, the problem is in seeing it as the whole truth. Most certainly, morale matters in war. And yet, the will of an army, expressed in an aggressive charge, will seldom find itself winning out over machine guns and artillery barrage. Although it is battles such as Verdun and the Somme which provide the popular perception of World War One, the highest rate of casualties in the entire war was during the first four months, as both the French and the German armies attempted to fight mass battles of offensive maneuver in the battles of the Frontiers and Marne, before both dug in and trench warfare began. In those four months, the idea that modern battles could be won through nothing but offensive will died a horrifically bloody death. It was developments in tactics (the creeping barrage, attack and defense in depth, storm tactics) and in technology (tanks, motor transport, air supremacy) which ended up being the key to victory in the Great War.

99 Years Ago: The Week The World Caught Fire

Certain historical events are remembered in terms of a single event which, in the course of minutes or hours, ushered in a new era. People who lived through Pearl Harbor could remember exactly where they were when they heard about the Japanese attack, a point when the course of US history (and world history) changed in the course of a couple hours.

Ninety-nine years ago, as the world plunged into the First World War, the experience was different. Rather than a single sharp event which plunged the world into cataclysm, there was a long series of events, at first not much noted, which in late July and early August of 1914 plunged all the major European powers into war over the course of a week.

There's a certain tendency to look, with historical hindsight, at the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 as an incident very likely to lead to world war. There were hints of such a possibility. German Chancellor Otto von Bismark famously observed in the late 19th century that the next great European war would start with "some damn fool thing in the Balkans". When Archduke Ferdinant was assassinated, some people immediately worried that this would lead to a general war. (H. G. Wells was among those with the dubious honor of predicting a general war was coming after hearing news of the assassination on June 28th.) However, there had just been two full fledged wars in the Balkans during the last ten years, and neither had led to general war. Indeed, the great powers, for all their diplomatic entanglements, had been able to negotiate satisfactory (at least to themselves) peaces to both prior Balkan wars.

The assassination was a slow fuse. A week after the assassination, Austria-Hungary secretly sought assurances form Germany that Germany would support the Hapsburg Empire should it go to war with Serbia over the assassination. Having received these assurances (now known to history as "the blank check"), it was not until July 23rd that Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, demanding not only that Serbia hand over Serbian citizens implicated in the plot, but also that Serbia allow Austria-Hungary discretion to act within Serbia to bring to justice those responsible.

The attention of other countries was elsewhere.

The British Parliament was debating home rule for Ireland, which it was inclined to grant. In response, Unionist groups in Northern Ireland were rapidly arming, and there were serious concerns that should a rebellion in the North occur, the British army (which had a large representation of Orange men within its ranks of men and officers) would refuse to fight.

In France, the public was gripped by a sensational murder trial: Madame Caillaux, the second wife of former Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux, had, on March 16, 1914, walked into the editorial officers of Le Figaro, which had published private letters by Prime Minister Caillaux which potentially brought scandal on him, and shot the editor dead. The trail ran from July 20th to July 28th and resulted in Madam Caillaux's acquittal on the basis that she had been overcome with feminine emotions due to the threat to her husband's reputation and thus had not been responsible for her actions.

Serbia, anxious to avoid war, agreed to all but one point of Austria-Hungary's ultimatum, however Austria-Hungary (which had withdrawn its ambassador as soon as the ultimatum was delivered) was determined to put an end to Serbia's role as a regional destabilizing force and declared the concessions insufficient. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on Tuesday, July 28th and immediately began bombarding the Serbian capital, Belgrade, by means of gunboats sailing on the Danube.

Russia, which had ties to Serbia, immediately ordered a partial mobilization of its army: putting its four military districts bordering Austria-Hungary on a footing of preparedness for war. It did not, however, initiate any military action against Austria-Hungary, much less Germany.

Germany was pledged to support Austria-Hungary should Russia take any military action against it. However, key leaders of the Germany military also saw responding to a Russian threat against Austria-Hungary as a way to provoke a war between Russia and Germany which they saw as inevitable, and do so before Russia's rapid industrialization and expansion of its railroads made it a more formidable enemy. On Wednesday, July 29th, in meetings of the German leadership, generals Falkenhayn and Moltke advocated war against Russia in response to Russian mobilization -- even as Kaiser Wilhelm was still conducting his famous direct telegram correspondence with the Tsar in an effort to secure peace. Further, since France had a military alliance with Russia, and France was perceived as the faster-moving power, German war plans for a war with Russia involved first attacking France and knocking it out of the war in a month-long campaign, then turning to deal with the larger, slower opponent. Thus, what the German high command was advocating was that they initiate a continent-wide war in response to a partial Russian mobilization along the Russian/Austro-Hungarian border.

In Russia, arguments were ongoing between Tsar Nicholas and his military leaders over whether it was possible to have a "partial mobilization", with the military insisting that logistical operations required that the entire army be put on a war footing. On Thursday, July 30th, Tsar Nicholas complied and ordered a general mobilization of the Russian army. On the same day Germany ordered a full mobilization of its army to commence the next day.

German mobilization, however, was not simply a matter of calling up their reservists and having troops ready at the borders. The German was plan was a detailed timetable designed to successfully prosecute a two front war against Russia and France. Thus, as German soldiers assembled and armed, the boarded trains that took them directly to the Belgian border, setting in motion an invasion of France through neutral Belgium.

On Saturday, August 1st, Germany declared war on Russia. Prepared for all eventualities, the German Ambassador delivered two copies of the declaration, one stating that Germany was declaring war because Russia had refused to respond to German demands that it stand down its armies, the other stating that Russia's response to German demands was unacceptable. That evening, France, seeing what was the wind was blowing, issued an order for immediate mobilization of its own army, including all reserves, to begin the next day, Sunday.

On that Sunday, August 2nd, Germany invaded Luxembourg, which it would use throughout the rest of the war as a staging area. That same day, The German ambassador to Belgium delivered the following communication to the Belgium's Minister for Foreign Affairs:

RELIABLE information has been received by the German Government to the effect that French forces intend to march on the line of the Meuse by Givet and Namur. This information leaves no doubt as to the intention of France to march through Belgian territory against Germany.

The German Government cannot but fear that Belgium, in spite of the utmost goodwill, will be unable, without assistance, to repel so considerable a French invasion with sufficient prospect of success to afford an adequate guarantee against danger to Germany. It is essential for the self-defence of Germany that she should anticipate any such hostile attack. The German Government would, however, feel the deepest regret if Belgium regarded as an act of hostility against herself the fact that the measures of Germany's opponents force Germany, for her own protection, to enter Belgian territory.

In order to exclude any possibility of misunderstanding, the German Government make the following declaration: --

1. Germany has in view no act of hostility against Belgium. In the event of Belgium being prepared in the coming war to maintain an attitude of friendly neutrality towards Germany, the German Government bind them selves, at the conclusion of peace, to guarantee the possessions and independence of the Belgian Kingdom in full.

2. Germany undertakes, under the above-mentioned condition, to evacuate Belgian territory on the conclusion of peace.

3. If Belgium adopts a friendly attitude, Germany is prepared, in cooperation with the Belgian authorities, to purchase all necessaries for her troops against a cash payment, and to pay an indemnity for any damage that may have been caused by German troops.

4. Should Belgium oppose the German troops, and in particular should she throw difficulties in the way of their march by a resistance of the fortresses on the Meuse, or by destroying railways, roads, tunnels, or other similar works, Germany will, to her regret, be compelled to consider Belgium as an enemy.

In this event, Germany can undertake no obligations towards Belgium, but the eventual adjustment of the relations between the two States must be left to the decision of arms.

The German Government, however, entertain the distinct hope that this eventuality will not occur, and that the Belgian Government will know how to take the necessary measures to prevent the occurrence of incidents such as those mentioned. In this case the friendly ties which bind the two neighbouring States will grow stronger and more enduring.

In 1839, all of the great powers had agreed to permanent Belgian neutrality. However, German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg now dismissed that treaty as "a scrap of paper". King Albert of Belgium rejected the demand that German armies be allowed to pass through Belgium on their way to France.

On Monday, August 3rd, Germany formally declared war on France, it's armies already rapidly moving to attack. The next day, August 4th, one week after Austria-Hungary's declaration of war against Serbia, German soldiers crossed the Belgian frontier, opening fire on soldiers and border guards who opposed them. That same day, Britain, the last of the major powers to become involved, followed up on its commitment to defend Belgian neutrality and declared war on Germany.

The general European war had commenced.

Maybe World War One Generals Weren't Idiots

I was interested to read this British opinion piece, making the case that British military leadership during the Great War was not the clutch of bumbling fools which has become the stereotype of the war.

In 1928, following the sudden death of Field Marshall Douglas Haig, more people took to streets to mourn his passing that had ever been seen previously or indeed since. The very public mourning as a result of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 was dwarfed in comparison to those that came out to pay respects to Earl Haig.

It took literature and some key individuals to change history. As one of my university lecturers once said to me, history does not happen, it is written, and that principle could not be applied more strongly to the case of First World War history.

With the publication of Alan Clark's The Donkeys (1961) and the production of Joan Littlewood's musical Oh! What a Lovely War (1963), a wave of popular history provided the foundation through which all subsequent knowledge of the First World War is filtered - precisely the problem with which we are now faced. Historians and thespians took the critical words of those men that had a grudge and an agenda to push, namely Lloyd George and Churchill, thus generating the idea that generals were both inept and callous.

But beyond the Blackadder episodes there is a raft of history that is desperate to break into the mainstream. No one doubts that there were a handful of poor officers at various stages of the command structure who made bad decisions that ultimately cost the lives of hundreds of men.

But as a country, we seem to forget as a matter of course that 1918 brought us victory. Could this have been possible against the might of Germany's Imperial Army with such incompetent leadership? Clearly there is another history to expose.

Trench warfare existed as the marksmanship of the British alongside technology and weaponry caused each adversary to dig in and seek protection. By 1916, almost all the trained and elite men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had paid the ultimate sacrifice. Despite its intricate planning and preparation, the first day of the Battle of the Somme was to be the bloodiest day in the British army's history, with close to 20,000 men killed. This day, as revisionist historians have strived to show, was to be a turning point: the moment in which the BEF transformed itself, from high command to man on the spot, from inexperienced city army to effective fighting machine capable of challenging and defeating the German army. A combination of factors proved pivotal in the BEF's transformation.

...

With every day's fighting that passed, officers were encouraged to note the aspects of battle that had been successful, and those aspects that had not worked. These experiences were shared between units, throughout the ranks and with high command. Indeed, in mid-July, official war diaries noted that "everyone however junior in rank to be permitted to express his opinion if he has any suggestions to offer as to possible means of improving our methods".

These experiences were to be collected and translated into three official manuals. In December 1916, Instructions for the Training of Divisions for Offensive Action (SS 135), the Instructions for the Training Platoons for Offensive Action (SS 143), issued on 14 February 1917 and the Instructions for the Training of the British Army in France (SS 144), issued in April 1917. These became essential reading for officers, who shared this knowledge with their men. Quite clearly, High Command and every level of command in the British Army were keen to learn and improve for future action.

One of the interesting things about World War One history is the fashion in which the understanding of the war has been shaped in cultural memory.

In the English-speaking world, most memoirs during and shortly after the war treated it as a horrific but necessary sacrifice. In the late 1920s, however, an increasing number of highly critical works began to be written and achieve widespread popularity.

Robert Graves's memoir Goodbye to All That was published in 1929.

Siegried Sassoon's semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels were being published at the same time: Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936)

Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth was published in 1933.

All of these were written by authors who had been fairly young when the war broke out, making them contemporaries of the "lions" of the front line, not the "donkeys" back at headquarters. The fact that their writings were published, and became famous, ten years after the war probably has a bit to do with the fact that the war itself was such a deeply traumatic experience that processing it into a finishing book length work took time.

Because the Great War was a war of national mobilization, and those from the educated class in particular saw it as their duty to "do their bit" by signing up for frontline duty, an inordinate number of very good authors ended up spending significant time in the trenches. (Not just "war writers" like Graves and Sassoon, either. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, among others, fought in the trenches of World War One.) Many of these men went to war with fairly romanticized notions of what going to war would mean. The actual experience of the front was, thus, much more of a shock to their expectations than was the war experience of the World War II generation. In addition to this shock versus expectation, the famous Great War writers were all enlisted men or junior officers. As such, they knew the bravery and the suffering of the trenches first hand. Doubtless is seemed impossible that such efforts could fail to achieve their objective if they were led well, and so it seemed clear that if battles failed to achieve their objectives, it was because the generals did not know their job and did not care. At the risk of making a flippant analogy, it is as if one tried to derive one's whole understanding of modern business from Dilbert.

It's also not coincidental that the wave of highly critical writing about the conduct of the war coincided with the gathering tide of between-the-wars pacifism and disillusionment. 1929 saw the collapse of the 1920s economic boom, and 1933 saw the victory of the Nazi party in Germany. The mood of the generation-after-the-war (or at least of elite opinion within it) was captured in 1933 by a debate at the Oxford Union in which the motion "[T]hat this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country," was carried by 275 votes to 153.

Although pacifism held on until the very outbreak of World War II, it virtually disappeared with the beginning of the war and the generation of 1933 did indeed fight for King and Country from 1939 to 1945. However, the anti-war works of the late '20s and early '30s were given new life in the 1960s as a new generation of scholars built a consensus around the image of the Great War as being the perfect example of the insanity of war. World War II was in some sense hallowed by its association with defeating the Nazis and ending the Holocaust, but World War I provided the perfect platform for attaching class divisions, militarism and imperialism.

Over the last twenty years or so, a new wave of military historians have increasingly gone back to the sources from the war itself and concluded that while there are certainly some examples of very bad leadership during the Great War (as in most) that the armies on both sides in fact rapidly developed their strategic and tactical doctrines during the war. The carnage of the war is horrifying and undeniable, but it was not the result of generals blithely hurling men into the muzzles of machine guns, but rather of two very evenly matched sides who were rapidly adapting their weapons and tactics, yet repeatedly failing to achieve the hoped-for breakthrough because of certain basic technological problems (mostly relating to transportation) and to the other side's matching innovations. William Philpott's Three Armies on the Somme is an outstanding example of this school of military history.

However, although this reassessment of Great War history has been going on among military historians for some time, the stereotyped view which derives from the inter-war period and the '60s has been very persistent in general survey courses, popular history, and in movies and books. It remains the case that "everyone knows" the Great War was about men charging through mud into machine guns for four and a half years. As such, it's very interesting to see the above article written and published.

Quiet on the Battle-scarred Fields

The date for Veterans Day is based on the armistice which ended World War One: November 11th, 1918

It's nearly a century since the beginning of the Great War, but as British photographer Michael St Maur Sheil documented, its battle fields, though quiet, still bear the scars of some of histories most concentrated and prolonged fighting.

Shell-pocked field near Verdun

Fort de Douaument - a defense near Verdun

Trench lines and shell craters still mark Beaumont Hamel on the Somme

Grave of French soldier Edouard Ivaldi in Champagne

And underground chapel made by French soldiers in lines near Soissons

Some more of his battle field photography can be seen here.