chapter five

v

Conclusions: 1918 and Beyond

Germany began 1918 with several distinct advantages. Russia was knocked out of the war, while the French and British were showing signs of war-weariness. In the spring of 1918, a hard German push on the Western Front nearly knocked the Allies out of the war before American troops could arrive in significant numbers. The Germans failed—and the Allies succeeded—because American manpower, coupled with Allied productivity and innovation, outdid a Germany that had reached the limit of what its population and resources could sustain. Allied victory owed as much to German exhaustion as it did to any other factor.

The Western Front in 1918

At the start of 1918, the key issue facing strategists on both sides was manpower. The German victory over the Russians paved the way for massive transfers of troops from the east to the west. The Germans left forty divisions of reservists to police their newly conquered territories in Eastern Europe and transferred the rest to France and Belgium. This gave the Germans a total of 192 divisions to deploy on the Western Front, against 178 Allied divisions. For the first time since 1914, German forces on the Western Front outnumbered the Allies. Moving beyond arithmetic, it is important to note that the German units from the east had high morale. Most units had tasted victory in battle from Tannenberg in 1914 to Riga in 1917. Many were trained in the new stormtrooper tactics, too. Their arrival on the Western Front gave a significant boost to the German soldiers who were already there. With superiority in morale and numbers, it now seemed possible to Germany’s lead general, Erich Ludendorff, for Germany to knock the Allies out of the war. Yet he had to do so with the forces at hand. The German population could not sustain much more recruitment for the military.

The Germans had numerical superiority on the Western Front but the Allies were still formidable. The French army was recovering from the mutinies (or strikes) of 1917 thanks to the reforms of Philippe Pétain. The British and colonial troops who had fought at Passchendaele were weakened but the rest of the British army had good morale and had done much to improve its tactics on the battlefield. Even the small Belgian army, positioned at the north end of the Western Front, remained cohesive after three years of combat. And the Allies were finally beginning to receive substantial reinforcements from the United States. The historian John Keegan points out that the 318,000 American soldiers who arrived by March 1918, supplemented by a million more over the course of the next five months, were perceived to be a “disequilibrating force,” in other words, a force that could tip the balance. American troops arriving in France had plenty of spirit. They lacked experience, but in order to learn about the battlefield conditions on the Western Front they trained with French and British advisers.1

With the arrival of the Americans, the question of Allied command structure was raised again. The British and French pressed for American units to be absorbed into British and French units. The U.S. commander, General John Pershing, together with President Wilson, recognized that this would diminish American influence over the peace negotiations and so they fought to preserve an independent American army. The French army remained the largest of the Allied armies, so it seemed logical to place a French general, Ferdinand Foch, in the position of supreme commander of all Allied forces. The British government found continued French command to be convenient. The prime minister, Lloyd George, was appalled by the loss of life caused by Haig’s determination to break through on the Western Front. Lloyd George would have fired Haig, if Haig had not been so popular with generals, politicians, and the public. Lloyd George agreed to place his lead general under the command of Foch, ironically in order to have more influence over him.

Foch’s German counterpart was Erich Ludendorff, who realized that, if the Germans were going to win the war, they had to attack before the Americans arrived in force. Ludendorff planned a series of several major operations at different locations on the Western Front. The first assault, Operation Michael, occurred on March 21, when seventy-six top German divisions attacked twenty-eight British divisions along a one hundred–kilometer front. The Germans unleashed a surprise bombardment with explosives and gas, and then attacked with stormtroopers. The main brunt of the assault fell on the divisions of Britain’s Fifth Army, commanded by Gough, who was disliked by many of his officers for his lack of attention to planning. His troops were still recovering from Passchendaele, too, while they occupied positions that were not yet fully constructed, thanks to the German pullback of 1917. For all these reasons, on the first day of Operation Michael, many British troops of the Fifth Army fled and twenty thousand prisoners were taken. Only a handful of small units, such as the South African Brigade, fought well enough to hold their ground.

Operation Michael was costing the Germans tens of thousands of casualties but their troops appeared to be making a breakthrough. After two days of advances German commanders imagined that they might be able to drive a wedge between British forces in the northern sector of the Western Front and the French to the south. Ludendorff poured more men into the breach, but they were slowed down by the rough terrain of the old Somme battlefield. German soldiers were hungry, too, after years of blockade-induced privations. When German troops overran Allied supply bases they stopped to plunder and gorge themselves. One German soldier, Paul Hub, wrote home to his fiancée, Maria Thumm, that “it’s great to take part in this kind of war of movement. When we move on we always come across civilians. That’s when we find booty. The English tins of meat are fantastic compared to ours. And English sugar tastes so good! Unfortunately, we’ve finished the English cigarettes and biscuits.” The troops foraged for consumer goods and they hunted, too. “The first few days we went pigeon-hunting. I shot some too. They taste delicious. There were many sheep here, but the Prussians ate them all. Some of our infantrymen said that dog tastes just as good and brought one in. Of course it’s all a matter of taste.” He even sent things back home, where he suspected that basic consumer goods were lacking. “One of my men found a pound of soap today. I have put three large pieces of soap and a bundle of string in a parcel for you. I don’t know when I’ll get to send it. But you do need this kind of thing, don’t you?”2

As German units looted the countryside and otherwise recovered from their marching, Allied reserves were able to stop the Germans’ Operation Michael, which ended in the first week of April. By that time, Ludendorff was ready with another stroke at the British, this time in Flanders, along a one hundred–kilometer front between Ypres and Béthune. In Operation Georgette, as it was called, another huge shelling with gas and explosives was followed by a massed assault using stormtroopers. Haig issued famous orders not to retreat: “With our backs to the wall . . . Every position must be held to the last man. There must be no retirement.” The British commanders of the First and Second Armies, Horne and Plumer, observed the spirit of Haig’s command rather than the letter. They staged an orderly retreat, helped by the Belgian army under King Albert. Taking up positions to the rear, the Allied troops held back the Germans and prevented the capture of Ypres. After three weeks of fighting, Ludendorff broke off the action.

Ludendorff, Hindenburg, and the German government pondered the next move. Victory remained elusive but the generals and the kaiser remained committed to war. The Allied forces were proving resilient in the north, for the most part, so Ludendorff decided to commit his remaining soldiers to Operation Blücher-Yorck, an attack on the Allied center that aimed directly at Paris. On May 27, after another massive bombardment along another one hundred–kilometer front, forty German divisions advanced against eleven French, three British, and two American divisions. The Germans, using stormtrooper tactics again, pushed a large bulge in the French lines, forcing the French to withdraw forty kilometers. When it began to seem that the Germans might be able to capture the roads to Paris, the Allied forces rallied. The American Second and Third Divisions halted the German advance in the vicinity of Chateau-Thierry. A brigade of U.S. Marines held a key railway junction at Belleau Wood. One of their officers, Capt. Lloyd Williams, was encouraged to retreat by a group of French soldiers. He replied, “Hell, we just got here!” The Americans, British, and French sensed that Paris was vulnerable and fought with spirit, once again demonstrating that the issue of manpower was closely related to the issue of morale. A follow-up offensive by the Germans near the Marne River on June 9 was halted by the French and Americans, who counterattacked and pushed the Germans back. Some German officers and politicians began to question Ludendorff’s leadership and started to express interest in peace negotiations.

The tide had turned against the Germans. Ludendorff mounted one more offensive near the Marne, Operation Marne-Rheims, against the French and Americans. French intelligence learned of the offensive in advance and the Allies planned not only a defense but also a counteroffensive. On July 15, fifty-two German divisions attacked and by July 17 they had advanced into the Allied positions but were bogged down. The next day, the French and Americans counterattacked successfully in what was called the Second Battle of the Marne. By this point Ludendorff’s spring offensives had cost the German army hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed, wounded, or captured. Even more soldiers were weakened by malnutrition and disease. The Germans could no longer replace their casualties. Their manpower was spent. But the Americans were delivering between two and three hundred thousand soldiers to France every month. American manpower was an important element of Allied success in the summer of 1918. So was the contribution of colonial forces to the British and French armies.

Manpower was the key factor in a war of attrition. In the spring of 1918, manpower problems on both sides were made worse by an environmental disaster, an especially potent worldwide influenza epidemic. Typically the “flu” causes aches, fevers, and respiratory symptoms that otherwise healthy people can overcome. Usually the only people who die from influenza are young, sick, or old. But every influenza outbreak involves new mutations of the virus, and the virus of 1918 was the worst ever. In the spring of 1918 the flu struck especially heavily against adults between the ages of twenty and forty, precisely the age of most soldiers and sailors—as well as doctors and nurses. To make matters worse, influenza is spread by the blowing, coughing, and sneezing associated with respiratory symptoms, which are particularly easy to spread in the confines of ships, trenches, and barracks. During the spring of 1918, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors on both sides came down with the flu and were temporarily incapacitated. Typically, severe symptoms lasted for three days, followed by one or two weeks of weakness. Ludendorff actually blamed the failure of his spring offensives on influenza, stating that “It was a grievous business having to listen every morning to the chiefs of staff’s recital of the number of influenza cases, and their complaints about the weakness of their troops.”3

In August 1918 the Allies took to the offensive against the weakening German army. On August 8, the British Fourth Army and the French First Army attacked along the old Somme battlefields. During the assault the British relied heavily on technologies that had improved considerably during the war. British artillery batteries used the preregistration techniques developed in 1917 to identify and immobilize almost every German battery. The Allies flew almost two thousand aircraft against the Germans, achieving complete superiority in the air. Aircraft attacked ground troops and also relayed information to the artillery, which now dominated the battlefield. The noise of so many airplanes also had the effect of concealing the sound of five hundred British tanks launched against the Germans. The tanks worked in support of mainly Australian and Canadian infantrymen, now considered to be the best troops in the British Expeditionary Force. To the south, the French attacked simultaneously, using approximately seventy tanks and several hundred airplanes.

Airplanes and tanks demonstrated that not only were the Allies winning the war with American and colonial manpower, they were also winning with greater numbers of superior technologies. All along the front the Germans withdrew. Approximately twenty thousand German troops surrendered, indicating that the German army was now demoralized from its failure to win during the spring. For this reason Ludendorff called August 8 the “black day of the German army.” Yet that day—and the following weeks—were not entirely black. Once again the initial Allied breakthrough staggered to a halt because of high casualties and also because commanders had difficulty communicating with and supplying advancing troops. To make matters more complicated, the Canadian and Australian soldiers had to advance across the old Somme battlefield, which was nearly impassable from all the old trenches, barbed wire, shell holes, and debris of previous battles. As the Australian and Canadian advance slowed, the British launched attacks by their own First Army and Third Army on German positions in the north. Again, the Germans retreated, but the big breakthrough did not occur. By the end of August 1918, it appeared that the German army was in trouble, but it still had the ability to hold its ground and inflict terrible casualties on the Allies.

It was in August, September, and October that the manpower situation of both sides was made worse by another outbreak of influenza. In the spring most soldiers recovered from influenza. In the fall the disease was much more severe: it appears that over the summer the influenza virus mutated. It continued to affect a disproportionate amount of people between the ages of twenty and forty. This time, respiratory symptoms were so severe that many died. Severe symptoms came on so quickly that soldiers were reported to fall off their horses dead. The disease spread rapidly, too, affecting people on every continent. People who lived in close proximity to other people were the most likely to contract and spread the disease. This included people who lived in cities, as well as sailors and soldiers. Around the world, it is estimated that thirty million people died. On the Western Front, the fall influenza killed tens of thousands of soldiers and incapacitated even more. The Allies suffered twenty thousand deaths and possibly five times that many soldiers were incapacitated temporarily. German records are not complete but it is known that German soldiers were dying from influenza, too. Veterans who had been exposed to the spring influenza appeared to suffer less. The troops who were the most severely affected included the new arrivals from the United States.4

Even with the influenza epidemic, the Americans, led by General John J. Pershing, still had a tremendous advantage in manpower. During the spring, American troops had fought as part of larger British and French operations defending against Ludendorff’s offensives. Now the Americans had five hundred thousand troops in France, enough to constitute a separate army. From then on, every month the Americans expected 250,000 more troops to arrive in France. Pershing and Wilson persistently advocated a separate American force, in order to maximize American strength at the peace negotiations. The French and British granted their wish. On September 12, the First American Army, with heavy support from Allied aircraft and artillery, attacked German positions at St. Mihiel, a salient to the south of Verdun. By coincidence the German forces were already in the process of making a strategic withdrawal when the massive attack began. Still, they were taken by surprise and beaten badly by the Americans. Pershing lost seven thousand casualties, but the Americans captured more than fifteen thousand Germans, once again demonstrating that the German army was suffering morale problems.

In late September, Pershing followed up his success at St. Mihiel by pushing north between the Aisne and Meuse Rivers, in the vicinity of the Argonne Forest. The Americans now had nearly one million troops. They divided into the First and Second American Armies and were supported on their eastern flank by the French Fourth Army, comprising French and colonial troops. The French and American armies advanced slowly in the Meuse-Argonne campaign, facing German resistance that was more determined. Casualties were heavy, with the Americans losing eighteen thousand killed and ninety thousand wounded, many from poison gas, while seventy thousand were sick with the flu. German casualties are not known.

Slowly the Germans gave ground. It seemed not to matter that American logistics were often inefficient and that American tactics were often ineffective. American inexperience was compensated for by American manpower and resources. This situation was remarked upon by the German veteran, Erich Maria Remarque, in his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front. At this point in the war, he wrote:

There are so many airmen here, and they are so sure of themselves that they give chase to single individuals, just as though they were hares. For every one German plane there come at least five English and American. For one hungry, wretched German soldier come five of the enemy, fresh and fit. For one German army loaf there are fifty tins of canned beef over there. We are not beaten, for as soldiers we are better and more experienced; we are simply crushed and driven back by overwhelming superior forces.5

At the end of October, the French and American force recaptured the town of Sédan, on the Meuse River near the southern corner of Belgium. Meanwhile, in Belgium, the British and Belgian armies managed to advance steadily westward during October. The Allies were now in a good position to strike into Germany. German soldiers appear to have recognized this. The closer the Allies got to Germany, the better the German soldiers fought.

Despite the best efforts of German soldiers, the kaiser and his advisers began to recognize that their position was hopeless. Some generals disagreed: Ludendorff was demoralized by the defeats of August and September 1918 but in October, as the German army recovered, he expected to be able to continue the fight. Hindenburg sided with Ludendorff but they were overruled by the kaiser, who attempted to open peace negotiations with the Americans. The kaiser and his principal advisers were concerned by the military situation but they were also worried by domestic developments. The blockade was starving Germany and significant numbers of sailors, soldiers, and workers were leaning toward communism, influenced by the revolution in Russia. On October 4, the kaiser announced that Germany accepted Wilson’s Fourteen Points as the basis of a peace settlement. Germany asked for an armistice—a halt in the fighting.

The German decision for peace was influenced not only by the situation in Germany and on the Western Front but also by events elsewhere. British forces—including many soldiers from India, Australia, and other colonies—had defeated the Ottomans in Palestine and Iraq. On October 30, the Ottoman government negotiated an armistice on a British battleship near the port of Mudros, off the island of Lemnos. The terms of the Mudros armistice were harsh but the Ottoman government was in a relatively weak position. The Ottomans were required to disband their army and surrender all territories outside of Turkey. Inside Turkey, they were forced to allow the Allies access to all ports and railways. The Allies gained control of the Dardanelles, while the Allies reserved the right to control Armenia, too.

More bad news came for the Central Powers. In September, Serbian, British, and French armies based in Salonika pressed north into Bulgaria. Bulgaria—which had joined the Central Powers in 1915—surrendered to the Allies. An Allied advance to liberate Romania was now possible. This alarmed Ludendorff and the German leadership because Romania supplied most of Germany’s petroleum products, including lubricating oils and aircraft fuel.

The Allies did not immediately invade Romania but they did press a large attack on the Central Powers in Italy. More than fifty Italian divisions, supported by British and French divisions, attacked an equivalent number of Austrian divisions spread for fifty kilometers along the Piave River. The fighting was fierce but, in the final days of October 1918, the Allies broke through. The Austro-Hungarian emperor, Karl, asked the Allies for an armistice. Shortly thereafter the Austrian army—and the Austrian empire—began to collapse. In the first week of November, Allied soldiers pressed north and east, toward the Alps, while Allied ships took control of Trieste, the port that was one of Italy’s main war objectives. By this point Emperor Karl, lacking an army and a navy, and leaning toward acceptance of the Fourteen Points, did not take steps to suppress nationalist movements that were taking power in Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and other parts of the old Austrian empire. In Austria itself, Karl was overthrown during the last week of October, when a provisional republican government took power.

While the Central Powers were being divided by imperialists and nationalists, President Wilson made it clear that he would not negotiate with the German government as it was currently constituted. Under pressure, Kaiser Wilhelm renounced power and declared himself to be a constitutional monarch, along the lines of the British monarchy. He allowed a center-left coalition government to form in the Reichstag, or parliament, headed by Prince Max of Baden, who became Germany’s new chancellor. During October, Prince Max exchanged messages with Wilson, with the result that the new German government accepted the Fourteen Points. The Fourteen Points were, however, open to interpretation, and the Germans tended to think that their own ideas about the points would prevail. Wilson angered the British and French by negotiating directly with the Germans, yet in October they, too, accepted the Fourteen Points as the basis of negotiations. They, too, had their own self-serving interpretations of the points and these differed from the views of the Germans. Not everybody in Germany was ready for peace. Ludendorff believed that, if only the war could be continued, the fighting would die down during the winter, which would allow the German army to regroup. His belief in continuing the war was not shared by a majority of the generals or the members of the Reichstag. He was dismissed by the kaiser in late October.

It was becoming evident that, after years of hardship, most Germans were turning against the war. A few shared Ludendorff’s views but were stifled. German sailors stationed in the port of Kiel received word that their officers were planning a suicidal mission against the British navy. On October 27, crew members of several battleships refused to obey orders. By November 4, an all-out mutiny was taking place, with sailors taking charge of ships and weapons and defying the German government. Revolutionary sailors took control of other ports, too, and even went inland to promote revolution. Meanwhile leftist factory workers took to the streets throughout Germany and took control of most of Germany’s provincial capitals. It was also becoming clear that the German government’s peace overtures were persuading many German soldiers that it was pointless to continue fighting.

Prince Max’s center-left coalition was not able to run the country for long. On November 9, he announced that he was handing over the chancellorship to a moderate socialist, Friedrich Ebert. Ebert sought to contain the revolution by supporting the authority of army officers and by concluding a cease-fire quickly with the Allies, so the German army could be maintained as a counterrevolutionary force. The kaiser abdicated and fled to Holland, opening the way for Ebert’s socialist government to conclude the armistice negotiations with the Allies. At 11 o’clock on November 11th—the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—the guns fell silent.

The Impact of War

The First World War was special and the First World War was not special. It was not special in that it was a continuation of previous trends such as imperialism, industrialization, and nationalism. It was special in that it sped up and intensified all those historical processes. This ensured that the world of 1919 was quite different from the world of 1914.

The most notable changes were geographical. Boundaries in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East changed drastically, as some empires were broken up into nation-states and other empires exchanged colonies. In many places, significant environmental damage had occurred. On the battlefields of Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as Africa and the Middle East, large stretches of territory had been burned and pillaged. Surviving residents returned in many cases and within several years were typically able to rehabilitate the land. On the Western Front, a relatively small area had seen four years of intensive fighting. Near the battlefields of Ypres, the Somme, and Verdun, the landscape was completely devastated, to the point where it was unrecognizable.

The war had a significant impact on landscapes and boundaries around the world. It also had an impact on the way in which people imagined the land. The war was started, in part, by German officers like Schlieffen who imagined that they could move millions of soldiers against France and then turn them around and move them against Russia, in spite of the limitations of terrain and transport. After years of frustrated movements on the Western Front, generals on both sides drew on their experiences to envision ways of combining manpower and technologies in order to achieve movement again. Meanwhile this heavily industrial war accelerated skepticism about industrialization among ordinary soldiers who experienced combat firsthand. They revealed their views of technology, environment, and war in the art, fiction, and memoirs that came out during and after the war. They provided soldiers and readers with a way of processing new ideas about the environment and technology as well as a way of coping with the enormous scale of the war’s losses.

The war took a terrible toll in human lives. The precise figure cannot be known because many deaths went unrecorded and also many wartime records were destroyed. Yet there is some consensus among historians that between eight and nine million soldiers died during the war. The estimates in table 5.1 by the historian Niall Ferguson are consistent with the estimates of most other scholars.

Ferguson notes that, even though the Allies won, in doing so they lost more soldiers than the Central Powers. He makes the further suggestion that the Central Powers were more efficient at killing. In order to make this macabre calculation, Ferguson draws on the war expenditures calculated by another historian, Gerd Hardach, who has shown that the Allies spent $57,000,000,000 on their war effort (measured in 1913 dollars), while the Central Powers spent $24,700,000,000. In other words, the Allies spent twice as much money to achieve one million fewer deaths.6

The war did not just cost the lives of soldiers. The historian David Stevenson estimates that, between 1914 and 1921, the total population loss in Europe alone due to the war included fifty million more. These losses are attributable to war-related causes, such as bombing, famine, and invasion. They also include European deaths from the influenza epidemic, which was hastened by wartime conditions, as well as children who would have been conceived had their fathers not been absent, wounded, or killed.7

The growth and decline of populations, as well as the allocation of manpower and other resources by states, are among the central concerns of an environmental history, and therefore have been a central focus of this book. It is also important to pay some attention to the application of medicine to diseases and injuries. In addition to these population losses, many came home from the war disabled. Advances in wartime medical treatments made it more likely that wounded soldiers would survive than, say, the soldiers wounded in midcentury wars such as the American Civil War and the Wars of German and Italian Unification. Hospitals near the front lines implemented the new system of triage, in which patients were sorted and then treated according to the severity of their wounds. Doctors and nurses were now aware of the germ theory of disease, developed by Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Joseph Lister during the late nineteenth century. They were careful to wash up while treating patients, thereby limiting the spread of infections. Blood transfusions began during the First World War, too, as doctors began to understand the role of blood typing. Blood losses from wounds and from surgery could now be made up, to an extent, by transferring blood to patients from unwounded soldiers. Surgeons also experimented with plastic and reconstructive surgery, to help soldiers who had lost limbs or who had been disfigured. Early psychology began to offer insights about mental illnesses developed by soldiers. In one noteworthy breakthrough, the English psychiatrist W. H. Rivers demonstrated that traumatized soldiers displayed symptoms of mental illness because they repressed their bad experiences. Uncovering and discussing these experiences could often help them to recover. Still many remained traumatized by the war, not only by direct experiences of fighting, but also by losses of family and friends. In understanding the impact of the war from a material perspective, it is important to note that wartime trauma pushed the human mind to its natural limits. Some minds survived intact; others did not.

Soldiers and civilians suffered trauma in all participating countries. Soldiers had traumatic experiences while civilians in occupied areas experienced trauma, too. The German occupation of Belgium and northwestern France was noted for its harshness. Food remained scarce while men were often used in forced labor. In Eastern Europe, where the fighting shifted back and forth over vast expanses of territory, overrun civilian areas were subject to murder, rape, and theft. Both sides persecuted Jews. In the Middle East, the Ottoman army persecuted the Armenians, while in Africa, the British, French, and Germans all forced men to work as porters, which resulted in the deaths of thousands. Civilians and soldiers experienced trauma in many different ways. Unfortunately all this trauma did not persuade most people to abandon violence. On the contrary, the historians Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker argue in their book, 14-18: Understanding the Great War, that before and during the war many civilians and soldiers embraced a culture of violence; that during the war brutal behavior became normal; and that, after the war, violence remained routine and accepted. Another historian, Joanna Bourke, explains the normalization of violence in wartime in her book An Intimate History of Killing, by showing that soldiers found it thrilling to kill their enemies. The normalization of trauma and violence helps to explain the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 1920s and 1930s.

As violence became normal, mourning became widespread. Nearly every community in the combatant countries lost members in the war. With the news of each death, friends and relatives processed the absence of loved ones, typically without the bodies of the dead, which were typically either lost or interred near the battlefield. Mourners turned to religion and even to séances and spiritualism to mitigate their grief.

Wartime losses were often described as senseless by the historians, novelists, and poets who wrote about the war in the following decades. The war’s senselessness was thought to find its typical expression in modern art and literature, in which traditional forms were rejected in favor of the experimental. But as Jay Winter points out in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, modernism preceded the war as an alternative art form, while most people processed the grief of the war in architecture, art, and literature that looked to the traditional forms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for solace. Much of the war’s art and literature employs traditional methods in order to communicate wartime suffering clearly to the audience, while the tens of thousands of war memorials built in the 1920s and 1930s tended to have features that were classic and easily understood. In particular, the buildings and landscapes that commemorate the war in national cemeteries are very traditional, with neoclassical forms and lists of dead soldiers’ names. The inscriptions on the monuments often took on a tone that was not nationalistic but that was still righteous, claiming that the soldiers made noble sacrifices for just causes. The memorialization of dead soldiers in this way, and the extensive efforts made to identify and bury their remains, stands in marked contrast to earlier practices that were less mindful. Only a century earlier, the dead soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars were heaved into mass graves.

The Peace Settlements

The pervasiveness of mourning and the acceptance of violence help to explain the harsh terms of the peace settlement that the Allies imposed on the Central Powers. The Central Powers ought to have been pitied, but the war had been so bad that in Britain and France most soldiers and civilians sought revenge. At the end of the war, elections confirmed that British and French voters wanted a harsh settlement. The Germans had signed the armistice thinking that a better settlement might be available, along the lines of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, but this was not to happen. Wilson’s idealism was moderated by Lloyd George’s and Clemenceau’s vengefulness and also by a lack of support in the United States itself. In the congressional elections of November 1918, Wilson’s Democrats lost heavily to the Republicans, who now controlled Congress.

Making peace became an exercise in historical interpretation. Historical questions underlay the peace negotiations: How bad was the damage? How much did the war cost? Whose fault was it? Interpretations of the war varied. The British and French had a realistic view of the war. It was a continuation of past policies in which these states maximized their own interests. To the British and French, victory provided several opportunities: to seize territory, to neutralize Germany, and to repay debts. Many Americans held a realistic view of the war, too: now that the threat from Germany was eliminated, it was time to withdraw again across the Atlantic and to embrace isolation. Yet to Wilson the victory presented opportunities that were more idealistic: to put international relations on a more peaceful footing. This did not happen.

The central question faced by the peacemakers was: what was to be done about Germany? The German government had sacrificed two million men in a failed cause. The human cost of the war had been high for Germany, and so had the economic cost. The German homeland was undamaged—in sharp contrast to France and Belgium—but the German economy was still subject to the British blockade and the German people had suffered great deprivations. (Technically, the war had not ended. An armistice was a mere pause in the war. The Allies continued the blockade in order to pressure the Germans into signing a peace treaty.) Inflation continued to spiral and socialists threatened to stage a revolution like the one that was occurring in Russia. In the spring of 1919, the Allies began to allow shipments of food to Germany, but only after the Germans surrendered their merchant fleet and paid for the food in gold. All throughout Germany, veterans—including thousands who had been wounded—were returning to civilian life. Many were traumatized by combat and quite a few had grown accustomed to using violence as a means to resolve conflicts.

The peace treaty was negotiated at the palace of Versailles on the outskirts of Paris. All nations that had participated in the war were represented, although the most influential were the principal Allies: Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States. All were motivated by greed. The Americans wanted their loans to be repaid. The British and French sought reparations from Germany (in part to pay off loans from the United States) and also hoped to expand their colonial empires in Africa at the expense of Germany. The Japanese hoped to secure German ports in China. The Italians hoped to gain territory from Austria. In the end, the Italians got less than they wanted and their delegation left the peace talks early. The Japanese were content with their gains in China yet were disappointed by the Allies’ unwillingness to include a statement opposing racial discrimination in the League of Nations’ covenant. All the Allies treated the German delegation with contempt. The Germans were not included in the negotiations—the Allies negotiated the terms among themselves and then on May 7, 1919, presented them to the German diplomats, who were housed behind barbed wire.

The treaty blamed the Germans for the outbreak of the war. As a consequence the terms of the treaty were quite harsh:

• Germany had to return Alsace and Lorraine to France.

• Germany lost all its colonial possessions, which were given to the League of Nations and then administered by the Allies.

• Germany had to give up numerous eastern territories so that a new Polish nation could be created. This included a strip of territory near the Baltic port of Gdansk that gave Poland access to the sea but that severed the German territory of East Prussia from the rest of the country.

• Germany had to allow the French to occupy several of its western territories, including the Saar industrial region, for fifteen years. The Allies were permitted to remove iron and coal from the region.

• The German army could no longer have more than one hundred thousand soldiers.

• The German navy was limited to twelve ships. None of these could be bigger than a light cruiser (ten thousand tons).

• Germany had to give up all submarines, tanks, and military aircraft.

• Germany had to surrender most of its merchant ships and one-fourth of its fishing ships.

• Germany had to pay war reparations to the Allies. The armistice agreement said that Germany had to pay for damage to occupied territory, but now the treaty said that Germany had to repay the Allies for the full cost of the war, which would be determined by a postwar commission.

Germany’s representatives at Versailles found the terms of the treaty humiliating. The German delegation, including the famous sociologist, Max Weber, rejected the notion that Germany was responsible for the war. They recognized that Germany had lost the war and would have to surrender some territory but they found the notion of paying the entire cost of the war to be preposterous. In Germany, government officials and the general public debated for several weeks whether they should sign the treaty. In mid-June, the Allies became impatient and threatened to resume the war. Under pressure, Germany signed the treaty, with the majority of German leaders agreeing that an Allied invasion and occupation might lead to a treaty that was even worse. In 1921, the reparations commission determined that Germany had to pay 132,000,000,000 gold marks, equivalent to $33,000,000. This sum is equivalent to about $400,000,000,000 in today’s dollars. It was impossible for the German government to raise this kind of money through taxes. Instead, the government resorted to inflation, which hurt the economy even more. During the 1920s the reparations were renegotiated. First they were reduced and American loans were provided to support the payments. They were reduced further in the late 1920s and then cancelled in 1931 when the Great Depression was in full swing. That still left many terms of the treaty that were resented in Germany. Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 was based in part on the popularity of his appeals to the German people to reject the Versailles Treaty. Under Hitler’s leadership, Germany scrapped all of the treaty’s terms.

Germany was treated harshly at Versailles. The other treaties signed between the Allies and the Central Powers recognized the dissolution of empires and redrew the maps of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire’s territories were divided between France, Britain, and Greece by the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres. The Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories were placed under the supervision of the League of Nations, to be governed temporarily, as “mandates,” by France and Britain. Britain received what are today the countries of Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, while France received Syria and Lebanon. The division of the Middle East came as no surprise to the Turks, the dominant ethnic group in the empire.

Wilson’s statements about self-determination implied that Turks would no longer rule Arabs. The same logic led most Turks to believe that they would govern themselves on the Anatolian peninsula, a Turkish-speaking homeland with a significant Greek-speaking minority. Yet the peninsula was divided by the Allies. Istanbul remained Ottoman but was occupied indefinitely by the Allies, who limited the Ottoman army to fifty thousand men. The Ottomans also retained the central, northern part of Anatolia, but the Greeks were awarded western Anatolia. And the French and Italians awarded themselves southern Anatolia, while eastern Anatolia was likely to become part of the new nation of Armenia. The treaty offended most Turks’ sense of nationhood. The Ottoman government signed the treaty but nationalist resistance broke out almost immediately, coalescing around the war’s most successful Ottoman general, Mustafa Kemal. Kemal took control of the government from the sultan and his ministers, while leading armed resistance against the Allies. The French and Italians decided that it was not worth fighting to keep their Turkish colonies, but the Greeks fought a bitter two-year war against Kemal’s nationalist forces. Kemal’s Turks defeated the Greeks and the final peace settlement of 1923 stipulated that all one million Greeks living in western Anatolia would be removed to Greece. Meanwhile, several hundred thousand Turks were sent from Greece to the new nation of Turkey.

Turkey became one of many new nations that grew up out of the aftermath of the First World War. The 1919 Treaty of Neuilly awarded parts of Bulgaria to Greece and the new Yugoslavia. That country was one of many to be recognized by the 1919 Treaty of Saint Germain-en-Laye and by the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, which together divided the Austro-Hungarian Empire into many of its ethnic components: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Italy and Romania received parts of the old empire and Austria was treated like Germany. Along with Germany, Austria and Hungary were forced to admit that they were guilty of starting the war, and, like Germany, Austrian and Hungarian rearmament was prohibited. Both countries were limited to small armies of thirty thousand and thirty-five thousand men, respectively. Austria became the only German-speaking remnant of the old empire, yet it was prohibited from joining Germany. German-speaking minorities lived in nearly every new Eastern European country, where their discontent simmered throughout the 1920s and 1930s. During that time, nearly every Eastern European country slid from democracy to dictatorship.

Wilson’s vision of postwar Europe had been one of democratic nation-states successfully resisting communism. Communist parties played a role in all European countries, yet nowhere did they establish a long-term influence. It even might be said that, in the years 1919 to 1921, communist control of Russia appeared to be fragile. Along Russia’s borders, national groups started to break away. Finland became independent and for a time so did the republics in the Caucasus and Caspian region. The Bolsheviks retained control of Russian Central Asia, despite the intervention of forces from Turkey and British India. The Allies intervened in Russia’s civil war, too, with American, British, French, and Japanese forces taking temporary control of port cities. Even so the Russian Civil War was fought mainly between the Bolsheviks, or Reds, and all other political parties, under the name of the “Whites.” These included parties ranging from monarchists to moderate communists. The Bolsheviks were more homogeneous and they had the further advantage of controlling Petrograd, Moscow, and the central part of Russia, including Russia’s main rail and telegraph networks. The Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, defeated the White forces over several years of fighting but Bolshevik economic policies, called “war communism,” were disastrous. The Bolsheviks moved to abolish private property and to control markets, true to communist thinking. Industrial and agricultural production for the market ground to a halt and millions of people starved to death. Lenin reversed this policy in 1921, at which point, under a ruthless communist dictatorship, Russia—now called the Soviet Union—began to take steps toward economic recovery.

It is typically thought that the Cold War between communism and capitalism began at the end of the Second World War but in many ways it began at the end of the First World War. The building of communism in Russia further undermined Wilson’s vision of a peaceful world in which democratic and capitalist nation-states participated in a League of Nations. In a cruel irony, the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate blocked ratification of the Versailles Treaty, on the grounds that participation in a League of Nations would require the United States to intervene in overseas conflicts, when it was the constitutional prerogative of the Congress to declare war. Wilson campaigned hard for ratification. Stress and exhaustion probably helped to cause Wilson to suffer from a stroke, from which he never fully recovered. Meanwhile, the United States slid toward isolation from world events. The next president, the Republican Warren Harding, concluded separate peace treaties with the Central Powers. American isolationism, combined with Russian Bolshevism, French and British mean-spiritedness, and resentful nationalism in Germany, Italy, and Japan, all contributed to the advent of totalitarianism and war in the 1930s. Resentment spread to Europe’s colonies, too, when loyalty was not repaid with liberty. For all these reasons it is not surprising that some historians argue that the First World War, the Second World War, the Cold War—and the wars associated with decolonization—were one continuous conflict.

Environment, Technology, and Change

This book has narrated the history of the First World War, while highlighting elements that pertain to technology and the environment. Geographical visions of conquest, together with technological capabilities for war, inspired plans to attack and divide other countries. Technologies such as aircraft, artillery observation, poison gas, and submarines all predated the war, while during the war designers and manufacturers improved them significantly. Even so, these improving technologies did not do as much as classic environmental factors, such as the supply of food and manpower, to change the course of the war. During the war, these environmental factors were closely bound up with victory and defeat. Meanwhile, we have considered evidence to suggest that people’s views of the environment and technology changed. Modern technologies were now more likely to be treated with a mixture of appreciation and horror, while the participants in the war began to see the landscape as foreboding.

The experiences of the First World War changed many lives but in some ways the war had a limited impact on the global environment, insofar as it can be measured. Around the world, crop production and industrial production rose, but increases can be seen in light of broader trends. In the decades before the war, industrialization and population growth were already having an impact on the environment, while production tended to decline during the disruptions of the 1920s and the Great Depression. For example, the historian Richard Tucker examined worldwide timber production during the world wars. He found that, during the First World War, there was increased production of forest products in Europe, North America, and the tropical colonies. Some areas were subject to ruinous overlogging but generally speaking forests recovered during the 1920s.8

There were a number of regions where battles were fought, ranging from Eastern Europe to the Atlantic Ocean, which saw temporary but not lasting damage. The main area of environmental devastation—the main environmental sacrifice zone of the war—was concentrated in eastern France and Belgium, an area roughly the size of the U.S. state of Massachusetts. In this zone, the landscape was completely ruined. Trenches and craters scarred the land. Woodlands were destroyed, drainage systems were damaged, and unexploded shells and decomposed corpses lay under the ground. Even so, heavy postwar investment by the French government in restoration efforts resulted in substantial progress by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which much of the same land was damaged again. It is correct that the Second World War set back the recovery. It is also true that farmers are still occasionally plowing up soldiers’ skeletons and unexploded shells, but on the whole the Western Front has recovered.

During the war, there were not revolutionary changes to the environment. The same might be said about technology. Most of the important weapons of the war, such as small arms and artillery, had been developed before the war and were only modified during the war. The same could be said about the main technologies of transportation and communication, such as the automobile, the steamship, and the telephone. In fact, the armies of the First World War relied most heavily on horses. For example, in mid-1917 the British army owned 591,000 horses; 213,000 mules; 47,000 camels; and 11,000 oxen. Many of the horses and mules had been bought in the United States and shipped to the Western Front, where they were used mainly for transporting supplies. New technologies did appear, such as the tank, but these were in such a rudimentary stage of development that they had only a limited usefulness. The airplane developed very rapidly during the war, and so did a few other weapons, such as poison gas. Still, we must remember that most casualties during the war may be attributed to artillery, machine guns, and rifles.

Old technologies remained important during the war, while people made few changes to the environment that were irrevocable, even with increasingly destructive military technologies. The greatest changes associated with the environment and technology concerned people’s experiences and memories. The experience of trench warfare and massive bombardments changed the way people saw technologies and the landscape.

Before the war, there were certainly intellectuals like Leo Tolstoy, John Ruskin, and Mahatma Gandhi who denounced modern technology, but for the most part people associated new technologies with progress. The human experience of industrialized war from 1914 to 1918 changed that view. Many of the sources already cited in this book reflect that view, but probably the most important work in shaping the memory of the war has been All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel based on the personal experiences of the author, Erich Maria Remarque, as a German soldier in France. In the novel, a group of German soldiers endures the terrors of industrialized warfare on the front, hiding in a dugout during a bombardment. The shelling presses them to the limits of psychological endurance:

We sit as if in our graves waiting only to be closed in. Suddenly it howls and flashes terrifically, the dug-out cracks in all its joints under a direct hit, fortunately only a light one that the concrete blocks are able to withstand. It rings metallically, the walls reel, rifles, helmets, earth, mud, and dust fly everywhere. Sulphur flames pour in. If we were in one of those light dug-outs they have been building lately instead of this deeper one, none of us would be alive. But the effect is bad enough even so. The recruit starts to rave again and two others follow suit. One jumps up and rushes out, we have trouble with the other two. I start after one who escapes and wonder whether to shoot him in the leg—then it shrieks again, I fling myself down and when I stand up the wall of the trench is plastered with smoking splinters, lumps of flesh, and bits of uniform. I scramble back.9

On the battlefield, going under the ground provides shelter, even though that leads to some soldiers coming down with claustrophobia. The landscape above, in the trenches and in No Man’s Land, is filled with danger, and is described as such throughout the novel. Only the earth can save them, an earth that is described in mystical terms.

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us—mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often for ever. Earth!—Earth!—Earth! Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man may fling himself and crouch down. In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life. Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!10

In All Quiet on the Western Front, the natural world is seen as sustaining, even in combat, while industrialized warfare is terrifying. The novel is remembered mainly for its critique of nationalism and for showing that the war was senseless. In that critique, Remarque deploys natural metaphors. In one scene, the soldiers are discussing the war’s origins. One soldier wonders how the war got started:

“Mostly by one country badly offending another,” answers Albert with a slight air of superiority.

Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. “A country? I don’t follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat.”11

But in many ways the war transformed the participants’ views of nature. As the literary critic Paul Fussell points out, poet-soldiers later in the war had even come to view the sunrise itself as hostile, an inversion of the traditionally welcome view of the sunrise that derived, in the First World War, from the anticipation of attacks at dawn, when soldiers waited, ready, in the posture of “stand-to.” One famous example of an ominous sunrise comes from Wilfred Owen’s poem, “Exposure”:

The poignant misery of dawn begins to grow . . .

We only know war lasts, rain soaks, and clouds sag stormy.

Dawn massing in the east her melancholy army

Attacks once more in ranks on shivering ranks of gray,

But nothing happens.12

Owen’s and Remarque’s works were strongly critical of war, but others reached different conclusions. In one of the most martial memoirs to come out of the war, Storm of Steel, the German veteran Ernst Junger described how soldiers survived a shelling.

You cower in a heap alone in a hole and feel yourself the victim of a pitiless thirst for destruction. With horror you feel that all your intelligence, your capacities, your bodily and spiritual characteristics, have become meaningless and absurd. While you think of it, the lump of metal that will crush you to a shapeless nothing may have started on its course. . . . You know that not even a cock will crow when you are hit. Well, why don’t you jump up and rush into the night till you collapse in safety behind a bush like an exhausted animal? Why do you hang on there all the time, you and your braves? There are no superior officers to see you. Yet some one watches you. Unknown perhaps to yourself, there is some one within you who keeps you to your post by the power of two mighty spells: Duty and Honour. . . . You clench your teeth and stay.13

For Junger, the war tested human nature and confirmed its strength. After describing the shelling for several paragraphs, he concludes that “human nature is indeed indestructible.” This may be true, but the First World War helped to change humanity’s view of nature and the material world. Veterans remembered a landscape that had become ominous, even surreal, while prewar visions of technological progress were complicated by the experience of mass, industrialized killing.

Table 5.1

Country Soldiers’ Deaths

Germany 2,037,000

Austria-Hungary 1,100,000

Bulgaria and Ottoman Empire 892,000

Total Central Powers 4,029,000

Russia 1,811,000

France 1,398,000

Britain 723,000

British Empire 198,000

United States 114,000

Other Allied countries 599,000

Total Allied 5,421,000

TOTAL SOLDIERS’ DEATHS 9,450,000

Europe after the War