Throughout Europe, wherever armies had clashed, or towns and villages had been bereaved, monuments continued to be put up, some small, some large, a few, as at Vimy or on the Somme, immense. Many of these monuments were often idealised beyond visual recognition of the conflict. In Budapest, to this day, a Hungarian cavalryman, shot on the battlefield, stands in his stirrups, his hand over his heart, as Jesus, descending from the Cross, beckons the way to heaven, leading the dead man from the dark clouds of war to the bright light of eternity. The cavalryman’s sword and helmet lie on the ground at his horse’s feet. The inscription reads: ‘From Christ’s faith, from the blood of heroes, arises the homeland.’
War memorials in Russia suffered the fate of so much in that land of continuing turmoil and destruction. In Moscow, a Brotherhood Cemetery was established soon after the outbreak of the war, and a church built in memory of the dead. In Soviet times both the church and the cemetery were destroyed. Today only one gravestone is left.
Books also served as memorials. In February 1920, the British war correspondent Philip Gibbs published Realities of War, in which he wrote of the need to avert ‘another massacre of youth like that five years’ sacrifice of boys of which I was a witness’. Franz Werfel’s novel The Forty Days described the Armenian torment, centred around the struggle to hold out against the Turks on Musa Dagh (Moses’s Mountain), within sight of the Mediterranean: ‘These women’s howls had died into a low, almost soundless, windy sigh. It went with the corpse-washing, the enshrouding, like old comfort.’
Werfel’s book was a cry of pain. Philip Gibbs’s book was a stark portrayal of the cruelties and barbarities of war. In it he also wrote, of the moral aspect of the war: ‘The evil in Germany (enslaving German boyhood) had to be killed. There was no other way, except by helping the Germans to kill it before it mastered them.’ In France, there was a similar widespread sense of the necessity of the war, exacerbated by the bitterness felt against the Germans for ‘war crimes’ committed against French civilians and for the devastation caused by the war on French soil.
This bitterness was continually revived by ceremonies and memorials. On 18 March 1920 the French Minister of War, André Lefèvre, unveiled a memorial to one of the destroyed villages of the war, Ornes, north east of Verdun. Its buildings had been reduced to ruins, the Minister declared, but its name had become a part of history. But neither monuments nor ‘history’ could express the inner torments that the war had created for those who survived the fighting. A Canadian historian, Desmond Morton, noting that 60,661 Canadians were killed in action, had written: ‘Many more returned from the war mutilated in mind or body.’
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During a debate in the House of Commons on 8 July 1920, Churchill recalled an aspect of the fighting on the Western Front that was often overlooked. ‘Over and over again,’ he said, ‘we have seen British officers and soldiers storm entrenchments under the heaviest fire, with half their number shot down before they entered the position of the enemy, the certainty of a long, bloody day before them, a tremendous bombardment crashing all around—we have seen them in these circumstances taking out their maps and watches, and adjusting their calculations with the most minute detail, and we have seen them show, not merely mercy, but kindness, to prisoners, observing restraint in the treatment of them, punishing those who deserved to be punished by the hard laws of war, and sparing those who might claim to be admitted to the clemency of the conqueror. We have seen them exerting themselves to show pity and to help, even at their own peril, the wounded. They have done it thousands of times.’
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In the summer of 1920, the Red Army forces under General Tukhachevsky, which had defeated the anti-Bolshevik forces of General Denikin in southern Russia in March, turned against Poland. The Poles, ambitious for territory in the east, had advanced as far as Kiev. As Tukhachevsky drove them westward, almost to Warsaw, Poland appealed to Britain and France for help. Among the French military advisers sent to Poland, to help the Poles resist the Bolshevik onslaught, was Colonel de Gaulle, who had taught Tukhachevsky French when they were both prisoners-of-war of the Germans in 1917.
The danger of Communism spreading through Poland to Germany was acute. Sympathy for Poland, one of the most recently re-created States, was widespread. But there were very few people who desired to return to a European war. On July 28 Churchill wrote in the Evening Standard, of the British people: ‘They are thoroughly tired of war. They have learnt during five bitter years too much of its iron slavery, its squalor, its mocking disappointments, its ever dwelling sense of loss.’
A week later, on August 4, the sixth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, Lloyd George delivered an ultimatum to Russia’s emissaries in London: the advance on Warsaw must end, or Britain would come forward as the champion of the Poles, just as in 1914 she had championed Belgium. Lloyd George’s willingness to go to war was made otiose within forty-eight hours, when 150,000 Polish troops halted Tukhachevsky’s advance at Radzymin, only fifteen miles from Warsaw. For the new Poland, this was the Miracle of the Vistula. By August 15, Pilsudski had driven the 200,000 Russian soldiers back to the river Bug, defeating them at Brest-Litovsk, and taking 70,000 of them prisoner. On October 12, the Bolsheviks agreed to an armistice. Once again, they had been defeated by a western neighbour. With that defeat, the violent clash of armies east of the Vistula, which had been almost continuous since August 1914, was at an end.252
As a result of the subsequent, substantial Polish advance, a Russo-Polish frontier was established in 1921, by the Treaty of Riga, which incorporated into Poland’s eastern regions considerable areas of Lithuania, White Russia and the western Ukraine. Unique among the post-war States of Europe, Poland, with territory gained from Germany in the west, from Austria in the south, and from Russia in the east, was territorially satisfied, though Russia remained, under its Bolshevik leaders, ambitious for the return of those territories lost to Germany at Brest-Litovsk that had not been regained.
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Some warmaking went on. In Afghanistan, Britain crushed a revolt and reasserted its influence over the Emir. In Anatolia the military struggle between Turks and Greeks culminated in the defeat of the Greeks and their mass exodus from the mainland. In Morocco, France continued to seek to subjugate the Moroccan tribes in the Sahara desert: the death of forty-one Legionnaires at Djihani, eleven years after the end of the war in Europe, created shock and anger in France.
One short-lived post-war success, in terms of justice and the righting of a wrong, was the establishment of an independent Armenia. This was one of the main decisions of the Treaty of Sèvres, signed on 10 August 1920. The much-mutilated people were to be sovereign throughout the eastern region of the Ottoman Empire which had done so much to harm them. Although the Turks still remained in control of the city of Erzerum, the Armenian leader, Boghos Nubar Pasha, assured the Allied leaders that he would soon drive them out. In addition, across the former Ottoman-Tsarist border, in the areas that had been conquered by Russia in 1878, a new Armenia had been set up, with Kars as its capital, which would be united to the area carved from Ottoman Turkey at Sèvres. Armenia would rise again and re-establish its ancient glories.
Under the Treaty of Sèvres, the United States would be Armenia’s defender, the treaty stating specifically that the frontiers of the new State would be ‘settled by the arbitration of President Wilson’. This paper triumph was short-lived, despite being inscribed in a formal treaty. In September 1920, after the United States had turned its back on direct involvement in the problems of Europe and Asia Minor, Turkish forces marched into the new Armenia, conquering them within six weeks. Simultaneously, from the east, Bolshevik forces moved into the former Tsarist areas. Independent Armenia ceased to exist, less than a year after it had achieved international recognition. In March 1921 the Treaty of Moscow, negotiated by the Soviets and the Kemalists, established a new Turkish-Soviet border, on both sides of which the Armenian people were once more under alien rule.
Other beneficiaries of the Treaty of Sèvres were likewise disappointed in their national aspirations in Anatolia. The Kurds, afforded local autonomy, with the right to secede in one year from Turkey, found no one in the international world willing to champion them further. Greece, given the Smyrna region of western Anatolia, was driven from it in a series of bloody battles, with Mustafa Kemal, the victor of Gallipoli, finally establishing his right to be called Atatürk, the Father of the Turks. The Treaty of Sèvres had become a dead letter, and, only two years after the Great War had ended, the Allied powers began once more their negotiations with Turkey for a peace treaty.
Outside Anatolia, the Treaty of Sèvres formed the basis of the territorial settlement eventually established in the former Ottoman lands. The Hedjaz became independent. Syria, to the distress of the Arabs who had hoped for sovereignty there, became a French mandate. Palestine and Mesopotamia became British mandates. In Palestine the terms of the mandate embodied the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, establishing a Jewish National Home and inviting Jews to immigrate to it. Within two decades the number of Jews had grown from the 50,000 living there in Turkish times to 500,000. The Arabs of Palestine also multiplied through immigration, while resentful of the British promise to the Jews, and rising in revolt against the British in 1936. In the eastern, or Trans-Jordanian part of the Palestine mandate, Jews were excluded, and the Emir Abdullah was given substantial authority.
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On 14 October 1993 a London newspaper, the Independent, published an obituary of Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Williams, who had just died at the age of ninety-six. Williams had fought at Neuve Chapelle, on the Somme and at Ypres, and been wounded and gassed. After the armistice, as a member of the War Graves Commission, he was put in charge, on what had been the Western Front, of 5,000 men whose task was to exhume, where possible identify, and then to rebury the bodies they found. His volunteers came from Britain, France, Belgium, Poland and Latvia.
Williams, and the head of the Commission, Sir Fabian Ware, had the idea of taking one of the unidentifiable soldiers from the Western Front and reburying him in England, where his grave could become a focal point of prayer and contemplation for the hundreds of thousands of parents, widows and children whose loved ones had no known grave. At first the War Office was sceptical. But Ware and Williams persevered. In the autumn of 1920 Williams was asked to select five unknown soldiers from the main British battlefields in France and Flanders. One soldier was then chosen from the five, to become the Unknown Soldier. The coffin was made of a British oak tree from the Royal Palace at Hampton Court, and the magnificent lead sarcophagus was escorted through northern France by French cavalrymen. The soldier was then brought to Britain on a French destroyer, the Verdun, thereby associating the wartime losses of the two Allies.
On 11 November 1920, two years to the day, and to the hour, since the war ended, the funeral and burial of the Unknown Soldier took place in London. A Guard of Valour formed entirely of holders of the Victoria Cross was mounted outside Westminster Abbey. On the way to its burying place, the coffin halted at the Cenotaph—the Greek word for empty tomb—which was unveiled by the King, who then continued on foot behind the gun-carriage to the Abbey. The Unknown Soldier was the focus that day of the yearning of many of those who would never know where their son’s or husband’s or father’s body had been buried, or ground into the earth. The King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, wrote in his diary: ‘Pipers marched before him, Admirals of the Fleet and Field Marshals of England on his right hand and on his left, and all London stood bare-headed as he went; while on the coffin lay the steel helmet which each one of us wore, and the long crusader’s sword selected for him alone from the King’s armoury.’
Henry Williams remained in France and Flanders for seven years, searching for bodies and reburying them. The land on which they were buried was given by the French and Belgian Governments to the Imperial War Graves Commission ‘in perpetuity’. Earlier, when a Belgian official asked Williams who was going to compensate the landowners for the land thus taken away from them, he burst out: ‘Look, we’ve paid for the land! You’ve got our chaps that have died to keep it yours.’
The body that had been chosen to lie in the Abbey in perpetuity had no name. ‘Of all symbols’, Lascelles wrote, ‘he is the most nameless, the most symbolic; yet few that Man has ever devised can have given such a clear cut image of reality; for every one of us who has his own dead could not fail to see that they too went with him; that, after two years of waiting, we could at last lay a wreath to the memory of that great company.’ It was the same day, and the same hour, on which the French Unknown Soldier was brought to the Arc de Triomphe with equal ceremonial.
In Britain, the Cenotaph became the national focal point of the annual Armistice Day parade. An estimated 400,000 people went past it in the three days after it was unveiled. In Paris the Arc de Triomphe, a monument commemorating Napoleon’s victories of more than a century earlier, became the scene of France’s annual Armistice Day ceremony. When the Germans entered Paris in June 1940 they marched around it on their way down the Champs-Élysées. In November 1944 Churchill and de Gaulle celebrated the first Armistice Day in liberated Paris under the once more triumphal arch.
Each warring power eventually unveiled a memorial to its Unknown Soldier. The Polish memorial contains the body of a soldier killed in the Russo-Polish War of 1920. The German memorial at Tannenberg in East Prussia, unveiled in 1927, contained the tombs of twenty unknown soldiers from the Eastern Front. In 1931 an Unknown Soldier’s tomb was unveiled in Berlin, placed in a neo-classical guard house built for the Palace Guard two hundred years earlier. In 1933 the Nazis attached a large cross at the back of the hall, ‘to emphasise’, one historian has written, ‘the sacredness of the nation which they claimed to have saved’.253
In the aftermath of the war, acts of violence reflected some of the bitterness which war, and defeat, created. On 26 August 1921, while walking in a wood near Baden, Mathias Erzberger, who had negotiated the Armistice with Foch in 1918, was assassinated by two nationalist fanatics. On 24 June 1922 Walther Rathenau, accused by extremists of having been in league with the Entente to defeat Germany (he who had supported the deportation of 700,000 Belgian labourers to work in Germany in 1916), was assassinated by nationalist anti-Semites in Berlin.
Outside Russia, Communist efforts to overthrow the post-war governments failed everywhere. The Communist regimes that were established in Munich and Budapest were both destroyed, more bloodily in Budapest than in Munich. In Italy and Spain, right-wing regimes came to power, led by Mussolini in Italy and Primo de Rivera in Spain, committed to the prevention of Communism in all its guises.
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The process of peacemaking took longer than the war itself. The war lasted four years and three months. It was not until July 1923, four years and eight months after the end of the war, that the western borders of Turkey were finally established. Having torn up the Treaty of Sèvres in September 1920, occupied Armenia, re-established Turkish power over Anatolian Kurdistan, and driven the Greeks from the Smyrna province on the Aegean, Mustafa Kemal agreed to sign the Treaty of Lausanne, and abided by it. By this treaty, Turkey would remain sovereign across a thousand miles of Anatolia, from the eastern shores of the Aegean to the western slopes of Mount Ararat. The Allied plan, embodied in the Treaty of Sèvres, for non-Turkish control of European Turkey, Constantinople, and the Zone of the Straits, was abandoned. Gallipoli, where the Turks had first shown that they could not be attacked with ease or impunity, was to remain under Turkish sovereignty.
The one concession made to Allied sensibilities was that the military cemeteries on the Gallipoli Peninsula would be accorded a special status, open in perpetuity to those who wished to make the pilgrimage there. Visitors came quickly: one grave at Anzac, that of Private George Grimwade, Australian Army Medical Corps, has next to it a stone brought from his home in Australia ‘and placed here in ever-loving remembrance by his parents, April 1922’. Parents could decide what extra inscription to put on the regular headstones. On that of Trooper E.W. Lowndes, of the 3rd Australian Light Horse, are added the words: ‘Well done Ted.’ At the southern tip of Cape Helles, on the clifftop overlooking two of the landing beaches that were most bitterly fought over in April 1915, a tall obelisk, the Helles Memorial to The Missing, lists the names of 20,763 men who died on the peninsula but have no known graves.
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An era of peace was ushered in after 1918 amid many hopes, and the protective hand of the League of Nations. Not armies, navies and air forces, but disarmament was the method chosen to keep that peace. Inside each multinational State, minority rights would be upheld by the Minority Treaties of the League and the minority guarantees of modern constitutions. Modernity itself was to be based upon talking, compromise, adjustment, arbitration, common sense, economic interdependence, and a desire to settle disputes at the conference table. A cynic might feel that all these elements had existed in Europe before 1914.
In the post-war world, treaties would form a legal framework of independence and the sanctity of the new frontiers (but, some people asked, had not Belgium’s frontier been guaranteed by treaty before 1914?). In August 1920, with the signing of a treaty between Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, the first step was taken among the new States of central Europe to create a Little Entente of mutual recognition and protection: within a year Roumania had joined them. The Locarno Agreements of 1925 brought guarantees, with British and Italian support, to the thrice-fought-over Franco-German frontier. The inviolability of the Belgian frontier was also guaranteed by Locarno. At the same time, the two new States of Poland and Czechoslovakia signed military alliances with France, giving their frontiers impressive support. The nations that felt aggrieved, especially Germany and Hungary, would be able to seek redress of their grievances through the good auspices of the League. Plebiscites, the democratic application of one man, one vote, had already adjusted the Franco-German and Polish-Czech frontiers in the immediate post-war period. Land-grabbing, whether the Italian seizure of Fiume from Yugoslavia in 1919, the Polish seizure of Vilna from Lithuania in 1920, or the Lithuanian seizure of Memel from German East Prussia in 1923, were frowned upon: they were precedents that were to be avoided in the new era, though it was during the new era that they took place.
Pacifism also flourished in the post-war era, focusing its efforts on a call for universal disarmament. As Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey had effectively been disarmed by the treaties, the pacifist pressure was on the victor powers, especially France, to cut back their armaments to a minimal level. In 1925, the year in which the Locarno Agreements appeared to offer a legal and diplomatic framework in which to avoid a future Franco-German war, with all that entailed in terms of repercussions, an Anti-Conscription Manifesto was launched, signed among others by Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi. ‘It is debasing human dignity,’ they wrote, ‘to force men to give up their life, or to inflict death against their will, or without conviction as to the justice of their action. The State which thinks itself entitled to force its citizens to go to war will never pay proper regard to the value and happiness of their lives in peace. Moreover, by conscription the militarist spirit of aggressiveness is implanted in the whole male population at the most impressionable age. By training for war men come to consider war as unavoidable and even desirable.’
Treaties, civilised behaviour, trade, disarmament: did these pointers to permanent peace have any echoes with the idyllic aspects of the pre-1914 years, or were they the manifestation of a new pragmatism born of more than four years of suffering and destruction? On 15 November 1920, at the first meeting of the League of Nations Assembly, a proposal not to increase armaments for two years had been opposed by six countries who were not even willing to try so short a moratorium: they were France, Poland, Roumania, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay. France became the most heavily armed State in Europe, with Germany disarmed under the Treaty of Versailles: a cause of German grievance as well as of inequality. On 4 August 1928, the fourteenth anniversary of Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Sir Horace Rumbold, who had been in Berlin in 1914, was again in the German capital, this time to present his credentials as Ambassador to the German President, Hindenburg. That afternoon he walked in the streets around the Embassy. ‘There was hardly a soul about. Two under-sized soldiers whom I met in the course of my walk represented the Reichswehr, which was then limited to 100,000 men. The great German military machine had been scrapped for the time being, but, as it subsequently turned out, only for the time being.’
‘The time being’ was over eleven years later, when a new national leader in Germany, the former corporal who had been temporarily blinded by gas on the Western Front in 1918, decided that he could reverse the verdict of defeat by rearmament, national mobilisation, terror, tyranny, diplomacy and war. Ten years after the end of the war he was already a political figure to be reckoned with in Germany, speaking in strident tones of the need for revenge, for rearmament, for the return of lost territory, and for the elimination from German life of the scapegoat he had chosen for his and their own country’s defeat, the Jews of Germany. Had a few thousand of Germany’s Jews been gassed in 1918, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf in 1925, Germany could have averted defeat. Not for him the proved patriotism of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who served in the German army, or the memory of the 12,000 German Jewish soldiers who had been killed in action between 1914 and 1918.
The post-war period lasted two decades, twenty precarious years of peace from the Great War to the second European War. During those two decades the literature of the war reflected all its emotions, from patriotic enthusiasm and national self-assertiveness to individual suffering and disillusionment. Histories, novels, films, plays and poems, music, paintings and cartoons, even postage stamps, kept the four years of war before the eyes of the millions who had served in it, and the millions more who had watched it from their homes, in newspapers and on newsreels, and heard of it through the letters and home leaves of the participants. Almost every general sought to describe and justify his conduct. Thousands of participants gave their accounts of the various episodes of the war. Ten thousand forgotten moments of glory were resurrected, as in 1923, when General Mangin described in Des Homines et des Faits (Men and Facts) his recapture of the village of Onhaye in August 1914, at a time when the French front was almost everywhere falling back. It had been one of the heroic actions of the early weeks of the war.
War museums were opened everywhere, and in the Soviet Union, anti-war museums. Relics of the war became part of many monuments. In England, in 1924, a Tank Museum was established at Bovingdon at which the very first tank, known variously to the troops as ‘Big Willie’, ‘His Majesty’s Landship Centipede’ and ‘Mother’, was on display. It is no longer there: in 1940, when the call went out for scrap metal to feed the munitions factories, ‘Big Willie’ was sent to the scrap heap, to become a part of the shells and shrapnel of a new war.
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Even before the battlefields could be cleared of the detritus of war, they became the focus of a thriving travel industry. In the immediate aftermath of the war, most of those who visited them were in search of the graves of their relatives, or the scene of their loved ones’ final battle. Vera Brittain, seeking the grave of her fiancé, visited the Western Front in 1921. Hiring a car in Amiens, she ‘plunged through a series of shell-racked roads between the grotesque trunks of skeleton trees, with their stripped, shattered branches still pointing to heaven in grim protest against man’s ruthless cruelty to nature as well as man.’
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Almost every year during the inter-war years travellers were joined by dignitaries and veterans at a series of ceremonies, mostly at the opening or unveiling of monuments. On 16 July 1922, at Jonchéry-sur-Vesle, President Millerand unveiled a monument to Corporal André Peugeot, the first French soldier to be killed in the war. The monument, which was destroyed by the German occupation forces a month after the capitulation of France in 1940, was rebuilt in 1959, forty-five years after Peugeot’s death.
On 24 July 1927, King Albert of the Belgians was present at the opening of the Menin Gate, the massive Memorial to the Missing that replaced the twin lions that had marked the exit from Ypres during the war years.254 The ceremony ended that day with the sounding of ‘The Last Post’ by buglers of the Somerset Light Infantry, and a lament played by pipers of the Scots Guards. The idea that ‘The Last Post’ should be sounded every evening was that of the superintendent of the Ypres police, P. Vandenbraambussche. It was, and still is, done by buglers of the Ypres fire brigade. The money for this was raised in Britain ‘to ensure the sounding of The Last Post each evening for all time’.
No year went by without another impressive ceremony taking place, and another imposing monument being unveiled. On 4 November 1928 both Foch and Weygand were present at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre for the unveiling of a memorial to the 3,888 British soldiers who were killed during the retreat from the Marne but who had no known graves: Unknown Soldiers to whose gravestone relatives and friends could make no pilgrimage. Now their names were inscribed on a wall of white stone.
There was a glimpse of the way in which the opening of memorials had become routine when, in July 1931, General Sir Hubert Gough, who had commanded the British Fifth Army in 1914, met King Albert of the Belgians in London. ‘I suppose, sir, you are very busy?’ Gough asked. ‘Oh yes, I am very busy doing the only job left in my profession,’ the King replied. ‘What is that, sir?’ asked the General. ‘Unveiling war memorials!’ answered the King.
The inter-war guide books to France, to Belgium, to northern Italy, to Yugoslavia, to Poland, to the Ukraine, to Turkey and to Palestine incorporated the remnants and memorials of the war as an integral part of their presentation. Findlay Muirhead’s best-selling guide to north-eastern France drew attention, in 1930, while describing a journey from St Pol, to a nearby hill which ‘commands a splendid view of the Lens-Arras battlefield’. At Arras, in the Place de la Gare, could be found the Head Office of the Imperial War Graves Commission in France and Belgium. In the Grande-Place about a third of the houses had been destroyed by German artillery fire but ‘are being rebuilt in the former style’. In the suburbs of Lens the miners’ pre-war brick houses had ‘offered little resistance to shell-fire’ but the mines themselves, ‘devastated in 1914–18 by artillery fire and by the German policy of systematic flooding’, were again in working order. Muirhead also noted, of the city of Reims: ‘Shattered by the bombardments of 1914–18 it holds the place of honour among the martyred towns of France.’
Honour was a word much turned to, and sometimes rejected, in the inter-war years. ‘The causes of war are always falsely represented, its honour dishonest and its glory meretricious,’ Vera Brittain wrote in her memoirs Testament of Youth in 1933, ‘but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time.’ While that ‘vitalising consciousness’ lasted, she reflected, ‘no emotion known to man seems to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality’. Civilisation could not be rescued from the ‘threatening forces of destruction’, she feared, unless it was possible ‘to impart to the rational processes of constructive thought and experiment that element of sanctified loveliness which, like superb sunshine breaking through the dark clouds, from time to time glorifies war’.
Vera Brittain had lost her fiancé, her only brother and two close friends in the war. For two years as a nurse she had looked after desperately wounded soldiers brought straight from the battlefield. On reading this passage after the Second World War, a former soldier, Hugh Boustead, a veteran of the Somme, commented: ‘I have seen too much of what men do to one another—the torturing and mutilating of the Whites by the Red Army in Russia, savagery in Africa and Arabia, above all the butchery on the Western Front. This is evident to anyone who thinks about war; what is less obvious is “the compelling power of this enlarged vitality”. That constitutes indeed the real problem of any League or United Nations.’
The ‘butchery on the Western Front’ was depicted for a wide public in and beyond Europe, in Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, an unalloyed portrayal of the life and death of a group of German soldiers. The writing was direct, the tone bitter: ‘Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while a fragment smashes away his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient force to tear open Leer’s hip. Leer groans as he supports himself on his arm, he bleeds quickly, no one can help him. Like an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes he collapses. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school.’
Remarque’s book was first published in Germany in January 1929 and in Britain two months later. Its title derived from the death of the narrator, killed in October 1918 ‘on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: “All quiet on the Western Front”.’ In 1930 Universal Studios in Hollywood turned the book into a film.255 When it was first screened, the magazine Variety wrote: ‘The League of Nations could make no better investment than to buy up the master-print, reproduce it in every language, to be shown to every nation until the word war is taken out of the dictionaries.’
That the First World War would lead to a universally agreed system of international co-operation was one of the hopes of those who studied its origins and its course. On 15 June 1929 the German historian Emil Ludwig, biographer of the Kaiser, wrote in the introduction to his book on the origins of the war: ‘This book demonstrates the peaceable intentions of the masses of all nations in July 1914. May it contribute to strengthen the idea of a Court of Arbitration, which is no Utopia, but a growing reality—not a permanently insoluble problem, but the inevitable outcome of recent experience.’ Ludwig believed there was no way forward except by such a Court and concept of arbitration: ‘There is only this alternative: either to do it now, or to wait for another war.’
Arbitration and negotiation did begin to make a mark on the post-war divide, but only slowly and, as it turned out, too late. On 8 July 1932 agreement was reached at Lausanne, in Switzerland, whereby Germany was virtually freed from her Reparations payments. The German liability, which had stood at $25,000 million, was reduced to $2,000 million, with the strong indication that even this remaining sum would not have to be paid in full, and certainly not before the original treaty date of 1961, then three decades away. But there was an ominous comment from the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold. ‘It must be borne in mind’, he wrote to the Foreign Office in London, ‘that it is a German characteristic never to admit that any arrangement is entirely satisfactory from the German point of view’. Hitler and his Nazi Party certainly had no intention of admitting that the Lausanne agreement had helped Germany. Renunciation of the Treaty of Versailles was a main platform of his next election campaign, and a much-publicised aim once he became Chancellor six months later.
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In August 1932 the French President, Albert Lebrun, inaugurated a memorial at Verdun: the Ossuary of Douaumont. Marked by a high tower, it had taken ten years to build. In it were placed the remains of 130,000 soldiers, French and German, whose bones were found on the battlefield. These bones could (and can) be viewed through special windows set at ground level. In the cemetery in front of the Ossuary are the graves of 15,000 French soldiers, each of whom had been identified. A monumental gateway nearby leads to the spot where, in 1919, a line of protruding rifles and bayonets revealed the existence underground of the bodies of French soldiers who had been killed when their trench was blown in on top of them. This too, the ‘Trench of Bayonets’, became a memorial, covered in a concrete canopy held up by concrete columns.
‘The Marne and Verdun will ever remain among the greatest feats of war,’ commented Clemenceau in his book Grandeur and Misery of Victory, first published in 1930. ‘Yet mutual butchery cannot be the chief pre-occupation of life. The glory of civilisation is that it enables us—occasionally—to live an almost normal life. The Armistice is the interval between the fall and rise of the curtain.’ When Clemenceau wrote these words twelve years had passed since that armistice. Nine more were left before the curtain was to rise again.
The Armistice was a recurring memory of great power for the former victors, galling to those whom they had defeated. On 11 November 1932, in a glade in the Forest of Compiègne, a ceremony was held to celebrate the signature of the Armistice there fourteen years earlier. The railway coach used by Foch for the armistice negotiations was brought to the glade, and a monument unveiled, showing the German eagle being cut down by a sword, with an inscription describing how, on that very spot, the boastings of the German Empire had been brought low. The railway carriage was kept in a special shed, to protect it from the elements. Less than eight years later, in June 1940, it was brought out of its shed, and used by Hitler to sign his armistice with France. For that ceremony, the monument of Germany’s humiliation was hastily covered by a large swastika flag. The carriage was then taken to Berlin as a captured trophy. It disappeared in April 1945 on a railway line fifty miles south of Berlin, between Elsterwerda and Grossenhain, where it is thought to have been destroyed in a British bombing raid. The carriage now at Compiègne is a similar one, with most of the original relics of 1918 duly reinstated in it.
With Hitler’s coming to power in Germany in 1933, fears of a new war, and preparations for war, went side by side. German rearmament, illegal under the Treaty of Versailles, was begun in earnest. Aspects of the First World War were looked at in a new light. German ‘guilt’, whether for invading Belgium, or for her conduct during the war, was denied. On 7 May 1935, the twentieth anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter interviewed Karl Scherb, the officer who had first sighted the ocean liner. He defended the sinking as retaliation for the British ‘hunger blockade’. He also said that the submarine’s only orders were to ‘do as much damage as possible to suspected British troop transports’. Captain Schwieger had not been guilty of wilful murder. ‘He merely did his onerous duty.’
Captain Schwieger could not join the debate: he had disappeared at sea while in command of U-88 in the autumn of 1917. Had he lived he might well have been brought to trial by the Allies, adding another cause for anger in inter-war Germany.
***
The controversies of the war, fought for four years in government departments and at army headquarters, were refought for the next forty years in books and magazines. The passage of time brought an increase in bitterness. In 1936, in the final volume of his war memoirs, Lloyd George wrote of the British military commanders: ‘Some of the assaults on impossible positions ordered by our generals would never have been decreed if they had seen beforehand with their own eyes the hopeless slaughter to which their orders doomed their men.’ Two years later, in the foreword to the abridged edition, he wrote of how, as Prime Minister, ‘I saw how the incredible heroism of the common man was being squandered to repair the incompetence of the trained inexperts (for they were actually trained not to be expert in mastering the actualities of modern warfare) …in the narrow, selfish and unimaginative strategy and in the ghastly butchery of vain and insane offensives.’
***
On 30 May 1937 five solemn ceremonies took place in France: the dedication of five American war cemeteries, followed in August by the dedication of an American war cemetery in Britain.256 These ceremonies called forth strong emotions of confidence in the cause as well as personal sadness. Even as the last of the ceremonies was taking place, the cause was being renewed. On 22 July 1938, as war again threatened Europe, and Hitler demanded the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia, the Imperial War Graves Commission completed its task of cemetery building for the First World War. That day, King George VI unveiled the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in Northern France. Almost a year later, at Easter 1939, members of the Old Comrades Association of the British Machine Gun Corps gathered in the French town of Albert, to unveil a plaque on the Town Hall to the 13,791 members of their corps who had been killed in action. It was just over a quarter of a century since the Battle of the Somme in which they had suffered their heaviest casualties. It was less than a half a year before war would break out again, bringing German troops once more to Albert, this time not for five months as in 1918 but for nearly five years. A few miles away from Albert, one of the four model tanks of the British Tank Corps Memorial bears bullet marks from the opening battles of the Second World War.
The politicians and commanders who led their nations in the Second World War had all been involved in some way in the First. Hitler and Mussolini had both served in the trenches. In the British Cabinet on the outbreak of war in September 1939, seven out of its twenty-two members had won the Military Cross on the Western Front during the First World War. One Minister, Earl De La Warr, as a seventeen-year-old conscientious objector, had opted to serve in the merchant navy.257 Only one had been too young to serve. Almost all had lost brothers or relatives in battle. Neville Chamberlain’s nephew Norman, to whom he was close, had been killed in action in 1917.
***
The Great War battlegrounds of the Eastern, Western and Serbian Fronts were overrun by Germany in 1939, 1940 and 1941. The regions where the most savage fighting had taken place in 1914–1918 became part of Nazi-occupied lands. New cruelties were perpetrated, which for the civilians under occupation completely overshadowed the cruelties of the earlier war. The sturdy brick buildings of one Austro-Hungarian garrison and cavalry barracks in East Upper Silesia, from which in 1914 the imperial soldiers set out to fight on the Eastern Front against Russia, became in the Second World War the focal point of the concentration camp of Auschwitz, where as many as a million people were put to death: at least 800,000 Jews, many thousands of Russian prisoners-of-war, Polish political prisoners, and captives of a dozen other nations. Another Austro-Hungarian barracks, the eighteenth-century garrison town of Theresienstadt, where Gavrilo Princip had been held as a prisoner, and where he died in the First World War, became between 1941 and 1944 the place of incarceration and death for more than 33,000 Jews. A further 88,000 were deported from there to be murdered in the east.
As German troops swept across the Somme in May 1940, they were watched by a former British soldier, Ben Leech, who had fought there in 1916. Between the wars he was one of the gardeners tending the war cemeteries: his was a cemetery near the village of Serre. After the fall of France, the local German commander gave him permission to continue his work. He did so, and also joined the local French resistance, helping twenty-seven Allied airmen to escape after they had been shot down over the First World War battlefield. He hid the airmen in the cemetery tool shed, within a few yards of German soldiers who from time to time came to look at the First World War graves.
***
Having conquered Belgium and northern France for the second time in twenty-five years, the Germans were confronted by the many thousands of memorials to the previous conflict. One in particular gave offence: the memorial to those French soldiers who were the victims of the first German gas attack in April 1915. The monument, at Steenstraat, in Belgium, showed three soldiers. One was standing against the Cross in almost exactly the position normally taken by Jesus, but was clutching his neck. The other two were in agony at the base of the Cross, writhing from the effects of the gas. The inscription described ‘first victims of asphyxiating gas’. The German occupation authorities gave orders for the Belgians to cover both the inscription and the figures with cement, but the cement soon cracked, exposing them again. On 8 May 1941, just over twenty-six years after the gas attack itself, the Germans forced Belgian workers to lay explosives, and the monument was blown off its pedestal.
Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Herbert Sulzbach, then a British Army interpreter, was addressing a group of German prisoners-of-war. In the First World War he had served in the German Army, winning the Iron Cross, First Class. Being Jewish, he left Germany after the rise of Hitler, and in 1939 enlisted in the British Army. In 1945 he was a staff sergeant at Comrie, in Scotland, where 4,000 Germans were being held prisoner-of-war. Just before Armistice Day 1945 he read them John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’. He then told them how they should celebrate Armistice Day itself: ‘If you agree with my proposal, parade on November 11 on your parade ground and salute the dead of all nations—your comrades, your former enemies, all murdered fighters for freedom who laid down their lives in German concentration camps—and make the following vow: “Never again shall such murder take place! It is the last time that we will allow ourselves to be deceived and betrayed. It is not true that we Germans are a superior race; we have no right to believe that we are better than others. We are all equal before God, whatever our race or religion. Endless misery has come to us, and we have realized where arrogance leads…. In this minute of silence, at 11 a.m. on this November 11, 1945, we swear to return to Germany as good Europeans, and to take part as long as we live in the reconciliation of all people and the maintenance of peace…!”’
***
Almost every year, long after the Second World War had ended, there was some ceremony to bring back thoughts, if not memories, of the increasingly distant First World War. In 1966 the remains of the German crewmen shot down over Britain when their Zeppelins were bombing London and the East Coast were brought from three graveyards to their final resting place in Cannock Chase, Staffordshire. A plaque was set up with the inscription in German and English: ‘Side by side with their comrades, the crews of four Zeppelins shot down over England during the First World War, here found their eternal resting place. The fallen were brought here from their original burial places at Potters Bar, Great Burstead and Theberton. The members of each crew are buried in caskets in one grave.’ On 11 November 1968, fifty years after the Armistice, a plaque was affixed to the wall of a house in Ville-sur-Haine, just outside Mons, where the last Canadian soldier to be killed in action had been shot by a sniper two minutes before the guns fell silent. In July 1994, several more plaques and memorials were unveiled on the Somme.
On 22 September 1984 Verdun was the site of the public reconciliation of France and Germany. ‘In a gesture of reconciliation’, reported The Times under a photograph of the scene, ‘President Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl hold hands as the French and West German national anthems are played at Verdun, a scene of one of the most bitter battles of the First World War. Before visiting the graves of French soldiers, M. Mitterrand and Herr Kohl paid tribute to the German dead at Consenvoye, one of the many German cemeteries in the area.’ President Kohl’s father had fought at Verdun in 1916. President Mitterrand had been taken prisoner by the Germans nearby, in 1940.
***
The destructiveness of the First World War, in terms of the number of soldiers killed, exceeded that of all other wars known to history. The following list gives the number of those who were killed in action, or who died of wounds received in action. The figures are inevitably approximate, nor do they encompass all the victims of the war. In the case of Serbia, more civilians died (82,000) than the soldiers listed here. In the United States army, more soldiers died of influenza (62,000) than were killed in battle. The number of Armenians massacred between 1914 and 1919 was more than one million. The number of German civilians dying as a result of the Allied blockade has been estimated at more than three quarters of a million.
The numbers of war dead of the principal belligerents were, according to the minimum estimates:
| Germany: | 1,800,000 |
| Russia: | 1,700,000 |
| France: | 1,384,000 |
| Austria-Hungary: | 1,290,000 |
| Britain: | 743,000 |
| Italy: | 615,000 |
| Roumania: | 335,000 |
| Turkey: | 325,000 |
| Bulgaria: | 90,000 |
| Canada: | 60,000 |
| Australia: | 59,000 |
| India: | 49,000 |
| United States: | 48,000 |
| Serbia: | 45,000 |
| Belgium: | 44,000 |
| New Zealand: | 16,000 |
| South Africa: | 8,000 |
| Portugal: | 7,000 |
| Greece: | 5,000 |
| Montenegro: | 3,000 |
The Central Powers, the losers in the war, lost 3,500,000 soldiers on the battlefield. The Allied Powers, the victors, lost 5,100,000 men. On average, this was more than 5,600 soldiers killed on each day of the war. The fact that 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme is often recalled with horror. On average, a similar number of soldiers were killed in every four-day period of the First World War.
***
From the last moments of the war itself, its human suffering was embedded in the fabric of the societies upon which its perpetuation had depended. The wounded men of all nations were to be a legacy of war which ended only with their deaths, or with the deaths of those who had lived with them and guarded their broken bodies or minds, or both. Ten days before the armistice, the pacifist Clifford Allen wrote in his diary of a young girl and a discharged soldier living in a cottage near him in Surrey. ‘He has lost both legs and propels himself about cheerfully in a mechanical chair. The other evening he was sitting talking to his bride when the kettle started to boil over. He forgot he had no legs and jumped up to seize the kettle only to fall into space on his sore stumps.’
The post-war human suffering of the former combatants took many forms. Hundreds of thousands of sons and daughters in the former warring countries watched while their fathers, with physical wounds that would not heal, suffered, wasted away and died. At the beginning of 1922 as many as 50,000 former British soldiers were receiving government pensions for the continuing effects of shell-shock. Multiply that figure proportionately through all the armies, and one reaches more than a quarter of a million men mentally damaged by the war.
Some who had suffered the severest physical wounds recovered to lead an active life for many years. A Welsh officer, Lieutenant Tudor Williams, had been blown up by a shell and buried alive in September 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. His own men had dug him out. A piece of shrapnel had penetrated his right lung and ended up in the lining around his heart. Despite bouts of ill-health as a result of his injury, he was a Grammar School headmaster from 1929 until his death in 1955. When he went into hospital a year before his death, the radiologist who examined him was fascinated by the piece of shrapnel moving in and out with each heart beat. Williams was one of four brothers, each of whom served and survived.
***
The last of those who fought in the First World War are now appearing in the obituary lists. Each of their stories reflects different aspects of the distant war. On 2 February 1991 the Independent published an obituary of Colonel Monty Westropp, who had been severely wounded in the head at Delville Wood, during the Battle of the Somme, returned to the trenches in time for the Battle of Arras, where he was shot through the leg during the attack on Fresnoy and spent seven hours crawling through the mud of No-Man’s Land, dodging several German patrols, before reaching the British trenches. He died a month before his ninety-fifth birthday.
On 24 August 1992, George Jones, Australia’s last surviving First World War air ace, died. He had fought as a private at Gallipoli, then served as a pilot on the Western Front, flying 113 missions and shooting down seven German aircraft, including two in a single action. Despite being badly wounded in the back, he returned to duty in October 1918, shooting down two more planes before the Armistice. In 1942 he became Chief of the Australian Air Staff, ending his service career as an Air Marshal. He was ninety-five when he died.
These were among the dozens of obituaries that I set aside as they were published. Even as I was writing this chapter, the roll call was continuing, like a muffled drum. On 31 January 1994 the Daily Telegraph obituaries included Thomas Glasse, aged ninety-five, who had served from 1914 to 1917 with the Middlesex Regiment, and Albert Frank Barclay Bridges, aged ninety-eight, who had seen action in the Battle of Jutland in 1916. On 19 February 1994 The Times published an obituary of the 96-year-old E.H.T. Robinson, a former assistant night editor of the paper, who in 1918, during the Arab Revolt, had been blown up by a Turkish shell and left for dead in the desert. In the same paper, on 26 May 1994, was the obituary of Colonel Terence Conner, who had fought against the Turks in Mesopotamia, at the battle of Dujaila in 1916, and in the recapture of Kut a year later, when he had been wounded. Almost thirty years later, during the Second World War, he distinguished himself in Burma, leading a battalion of the same regiment (the 26th Punjabis) with which he had fought in Mesopotamia, in the struggle in March 1945 to wrest Meiktila airfield from the Japanese. He was ninety-nine years old when he died.
The phraseology of the First World War continues to be a feature of conversation eight decades after the outbreak of the First World War: being subjected to a ‘barrage’ of complaints, being ‘bombarded’ with forms, joining the ‘rank-and-file’, finding oneself in the ‘firing-line’, and going ‘over the top’ are among the images and terminology of a war that are with us still. As with the American Civil War which preceded it by half a century, the images and echoes of the First World War will continue to impinge on public consciousness for generations far removed from its harsh realities.
***
The eightieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of one of the main turning points of the Second World War, the Normandy Landings of 1944. During a visit to Normandy during the final week of work on this book, I chanced upon a Second World War headstone in a British military cemetery a few miles inland from the beaches. It commemorated the thirty-year-old Sergeant A. Barber, Royal Artillery, who had been killed on 2 August 1944, almost thirty years to the day after the outbreak of the First World War. He had been four years old when his father died in France in 1918. The inscription on his grave reads:
Dear son of Ann Barber
His father killed in action
1918 is buried at Condé
remembered
This remembrance of the dead, linking the two world wars of this century, brought home to me the links between the individuals who fought, and those who remained to guard their memories. All wars end up being reduced to statistics, strategies, debates about their origins and results. These debates about war are important, but not more important than the human story of those who fought in them.