For the British and the French, the Great War has a time and a 
place. It began in August 1914, and it ended with the armistice at 11 
a.m. on 11 November 1918. It took place in Flanders and in eastern 
France (more specifically, British memories are dominated by the 
Battle of the Somme, while those of the French are dominated by that 
of Verdun). The war cost millions of pounds and millions of lives, but 
it did not cause much physical suffering to civilians. Indeed, the nov¬ 
elty of the Great War on the western front was that it was confined to 
such a small area and that casualties were almost exclusively caused by 
weapons (mostly artillery) rather than starvation and disease. It could 
be summed up with Petain’s brutal platitude ‘lefeu tue\ 
For other European countries, things were less clear. Spain, 
Sweden, Holland, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland did not partic¬ 
ipate. Italy, Bulgaria, Portugal and Greece joined the fighting between 
1915 and 1917. Romania entered the war in August 1916, accepted an 
armistice with Germany in December 1917, and declared war again in 
November 1918. The Bolshevik government of Russia tried what 
Trotsky called ‘neither war nor peace’ before finally accepting the 
52 
A History in Fragments 
humiliating terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. For 
Russia, as for much of central Europe, the formal end of war did not 
mean the end of fighting. Civil war, rebellion and repression contin¬ 
ued into the 1920s. 
The nature of the war as well as its chronology were different away 
from the western front. For one thing, there was no single ‘eastern 
front’. Austrian troops fought against the Italians in the Alps and the 
Russians in Galicia. Turks held British and Australian troops on the 
beach at Gallipoli and fought Russian troops in the east of their coun¬ 
try. Russian, Austrian and German armies often fought a war of 
movement, and large numbers of civilians were obliged to flee invad¬ 
ing armies (as in Serbia) or were massacred (as in Turkey). Here, war 
did not just mean ‘lefeu tue. Disease and starvation ravaged the civil¬ 
ian population. The destruction of the war was not contained on the 
front line but spilt out until it led to the overthrow of a monarchy (in 
Germany), an empire (in Austria-Hungary) and an entire social order 
(in Russia). Examining why the war took such dramatically different 
forms in east and west helps to explain not only who won the war but 
also what legacy it left for Europe after 1918. 
Origins of war 
Ten years after the end of the war, the French historian Elie Halevy told 
an audience in Oxford that ‘what decided the German government to 
prepare for an eventual European War was a crisis that was brewing, 
not in the highly industrialised and capitalistic West, but among the 
primitive communities of the south-east of Europe. War came to the 
West from the East; it was forced upon the West by the East.’1 
This is a beguiling explanation. Britain, France and Germany were 
all industrialised countries with highly educated populations and 
more or less universal male suffrage. Why should states that were so 
well placed to calculate their interests rationally embark on a war 
that was to bring such destruction? Commercial links between the 
industrialised countries appeared to make their interests inseparable. 
In a famous book, published in 1909, Norman Angell had argued 
that the notion that any industrialised power could benefit from war 
The Great War 
53 
was a ‘great illusion’.2 A Lloyd’s underwriter told the Committee of 
Imperial Defence that he would feel obliged to pay compensation if 
the Royal Navy sank a German ship.3 
The war began with the assassination of Archduke Franz 
Ferdinand of Austria by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb, and the sub¬ 
sequent Austrian attempt to impose humiliating conditions on 
Serbia, which was blamed for the assassination. Princip came from 
one of the most economically backward communities in Europe. 
Serbia was a country of fanaticism and violence (the previous king 
had been horribly murdered by nationalist officers in 1903). Austria- 
Hungary was also, by the standards of western Europe, economically 
backward and the Hungarian part of the monarchy was probably the 
least democratic state on the continent. Austrian officers had become 
increasingly worried by nationalist discontent in the years preceding 
1914, and some had come to feel that war would offer a means to 
assert control over the Slavs, who seemed to threaten the Empire, 
and to restore the authority of the army. 
It is not, however, fair to say that the ‘primitive communities of the 
south-east of Europe’ caused European war in 1914. Princip himself 
told a prison psychiatrist in 1916 that he was horrified by the out¬ 
come of his actions. He and his accomplices were motivated by 
resentment at the status of Bosnia Herzegovina, which had been 
annexed by the Habsburg monarchy in 1908, as well as by bitterness 
at the poverty of the countryside that was their home and by the 
example of certain Russian anarchists. But they had no precise aims in 
mind. Princip himself resented his rejection for service in the Serbian 
army in the war of 1913 (he was too small). More than anything else, 
he seemed to have wished to die a hero’s death. As it turned out, he 
was one of the few European men of his generation not to have a 
chance to die in combat. 
Princip and his associates had been supported by conspirators in 
the Serbian military, but the Serbian government had no desire for a 
war that would devastate the country. Far from being a nationalist 
fanatic, King Peter admired John Stuart Mill and had spent most of 
his life in Switzerland. Serbia did its best to appease the Austrians and 
only resisted when they insisted on conducting their own enquiries 
on Serbian soil. 
54 
A History in Fragments 
In truth, the actions of Serbia, Austria-Hungary and Russia cannot 
be explained without reference to those of the western powers. If war 
‘came ... from the East’, then it was sustained by the West. Austria- 
Hungary would never have acted as she did if Germany had not 
agreed (on 5-6 July) to give her support. Russia would not have 
mobilised if she had not been allied with France, which had provided 
many of the resources for Russian armament in the previous decade. 
Most important of all, the war started by Serbia, Austria-Hungary and 
Russia was not ‘the Great War’, the extremely destructive nature of 
which came from the very fact that it was fought by highly industri¬ 
alised powers. In 1898, Ivan Bloch, a Russian banker, wrote a book 
that was published in English under the title Is War Now Impossible?, 
in which he argued that modern war was so destructive that no state 
could sustain it; starvation and economic collapse would bring it to 
an end. Bloch was, in large measure, right. The states of eastern and 
central Europe could not survive modern warfare. The only one that 
kept fighting until the armistice of 1918 was Austria-Hungary, kept in 
the war by pressure from her German ally. In central and eastern 
Europe, defeat meant general economic and social collapse, not 
simply the destruction of armies on the battlefield. Bloch was, how¬ 
ever, wrong with regard to the western powers. Britain, France and 
(until 1918) Germany were able to sustain a war of unprecedented 
destruction, partly because much of the lighting was confined to a 
small area, and also because suffering was concentrated on a small 
group of the population (young men). Furthermore, the western 
powers benefited from high levels of industrialisation, organisation 
and education. They could manufacture huge quantities of munitions 
and transport them to the front. They could rely on the discipline 
instilled in their populations by education and compulsory military 
service. It was the bourgeoisie of western Europe that behaved in the 
most irrational way during the First World War, continuing to obey 
orders even when such obedience was certain to bring their death. It 
was the ‘primitive’ peasant populations of eastern Europe who 
behaved most rationally - they deserted, allowed themselves to be 
taken prisoner or mutinied. The fact that the war proved so long and 
so destructive was the result of the ‘sophistication’ of western 
European societies, not the ‘primitive’ nature of east European ones. 
The Great War 
The nature of fighting 
55 
On the western front, the Great War meant trenches. The Germans 
began with a rapid advance through Belgium into France, and the war 
was to finish with another burst of movement in 1918. In the inter¬ 
vening period, the two sides dug in and faced each other across 
distances that were sometimes so short that it was possible to lob 
hand grenades from one side to the other. Barbed wire, machine guns 
and the rapid fire of magazine rifles gave defenders an advantage. 
Conditions on the western front could be dangerous and squalid: 
one psychologist described treating a man who had been blown off 
his feet by a shell and had fallen on a decomposing corpse, so that his 
mouth filled with rotting entrails.4 However, no one endured such 
horrors all the time. There were long periods of calm between attacks, 
and conditions in the trenches, which seemed so awful to junior offi¬ 
cers, may have seemed less shocking to those who had endured 
poverty and manual labour. 
In some respects, the conditions of the western front might even 
seem benign. In previous wars, especially those that had involved 
European troops fighting in unfamiliar climates far from hospitals, 
soldiers were more likely to die of disease than wounds: during the 
Italian campaign in Libya in 1911-12,1,432 soldiers died as a result of 
enemy action, while 1,948 died of disease.5 On the western front, 
well-disciplined troops who were close to reasonably good medical 
facilities often enjoyed better health than they would have done at 
home. Less than one-tenth of deaths in the German army were due to 
disease.6 Army rations were generous: British recruits increased in 
height when put on a diet of corned beef, while French peasants, who 
would rarely have eaten meat before 1914, were now provided with 
up to half a kilogram per day.7 
War in the east was different from that in the west. Fighting was 
more mobile. A war that began with the Russian invasion of Germany 
finished with Germany holding territory in the Russian Empire that 
exceeded anything Hitler was to gain in the Second World War. The 
trench system in the east was never as well developed as that in the 
west. Lines were longer and more difficult to defend. The Russian 
army did not adopt effective techniques of trench warfare and its 
56 
A History in Fragments 
trenches often filled with water or collapsed. Defenders did not have 
the advantage that they had in the west: the Russians retreated 100 
miles in 1915. The role of the cavalry illustrated the differences 
between the eastern and western fronts. In the west, it turned out to 
be almost useless, though this did not prevent cavalrymen from pre¬ 
dominating among the generals who sent infantrymen to their 
deaths.8 On the eastern front, and in the various conflicts that fol¬ 
lowed in Russia and Poland, mounted soldiers had an important role, 
which may be why the Poles overestimated the value of such forces in 
1939. Equipment for the Russian army was poor (some soldiers were 
not even provided with rifles and had to wait to pick one up from a 
dead comrade). Conditions were worse than in France. Food rotted. 
Disease and hunger as well as bullets claimed the lives of Russian, 
Austrian and Italian soldiers. During a single night in the Carpathian 
mountains, a Croat regiment lost 1,800 men to hypothermia.9 
Armies 
Why did soldiers put up with it? On the western front, troops pften 
mocked their superiors and discreetly subverted orders, but they 
rarely rebelled outright. Part of the French army mutinied after a 
bloody offensive in 1917, but even this was more of a strike than an 
attempted revolution. Soldiers did not turn their weapons on senior 
officers or make contact with civilians; neither did they, on the whole, 
leave their posts. Many made it clear that they would defend their 
positions if the Germans attacked. The most important burst of ill 
discipline in the British army, at Etaples in 1917, was even more lim¬ 
ited in its aims, directed against an unpopular training programme. 
Mutinies were more common at the end of the war, when troops 
were being demobilised, or among sailors who had barely seen 
combat than among soldiers facing the dangers of trench warfare. 
In part, soldiers at the front were controlled by brutal discipline. 
The British army shot several hundred deserters during the course of 
the war: families were told that the victims had been ‘killed in action’. 
The French shot fifty-five men after the mutinies of 1917. In the 
Italian army, men were executed for offences as trivial as smoking a 
The Great War 
57 
pipe while on duty: Italian courts martial passed a total of 4,000 
death sentences between 1915 and 1918 (750 of which were carried 
out).10 The nature of trench warfare made the exercise of discipline 
easier. The very fact that troops were stuck in one place made them 
relatively easy to control. If they moved in one direction they would 
be shot by the enemy, and if they attempted to fall back, they could be 
dealt with by reserve troops. Discipline in all armies deteriorated 
once troops were demobilised and moved away from the trenches 
(which had a particularly devastating impact on the countries that 
demobilised after defeat). However, fear of punishment alone cannot 
explain everything. The German army remained well disciplined 
despite the fact that penalties were comparatively light, while savage 
punishments in the Italian army did not prevent chronic desertion. 
The separation of soldiers and civilians was important to the main¬ 
tenance of discipline in the west. Soldiers did not join workers’ strikes 
and, indeed, could be relied on to put such rebellions down. This 
willingness was rooted partly in a social separation: soldiers were 
mainly drawn from the peasantry or the lower middle class, while 
workers were often kept out of the war in order to maintain muni¬ 
tions production. Not surprisingly, soldiers resented those that they 
perceived as shirkers. The nature of fighting on the western front 
reinforced the separation, as soldiers were unlikely to encounter 
workers unless they had been sent to fight them. Reports from the 
Isere in France cast an interesting light on relations between civilians 
and soldiers. Protests against the war came from both groups, but the 
two never worked in concert. On the contrary, soldiers on leave who 
complained about the war excited animosity from civilians, while 
civilians who incited soldiers against the war were likely to be beaten 
up.11 
Armies were also held together by less obvious forces. Soldiers at 
the front had little reason to feel hostile to their immediate com¬ 
manders, junior officers who probably ran even greater risks than 
themselves. The generalised hostility to distant staff officers may, by 
helping to bind men at the front together, have lessened the risk of 
mutiny. Patriotism played little role in the thinking of men at the 
front. The intercepted letters of French soldiers were written in terms 
of resignation rather than enthusiasm, and they looked forward to 
58 
A History in Fragments 
peace rather than victory. However, soldiers often felt a desire to 
defend territory, which was particularly strong on the part of those 
fighting on home ground. Such feelings account for the resonance of 
the defensive battle at Verdun and of Petain’s phrase ‘They shall not 
pass’. It is significant that morale among French troops serving in 
Italy and the east was lower than that among troops in France. 
German troops were not, except briefly in 1914, fighting on home ter¬ 
ritory, but they too seem to have felt that defence was more legitimate 
than attack; German soldiers were more prone to remember the 
defensive battle that they had fought on the Somme than the offensive 
that they had waged at Verdun.12 
Discipline away from the western front was worse. Many soldiers in 
the Austrian, Italian and Russian armies did not feel that they were 
fighting a defensive war. Austro-Hungarian soldiers, as opposed to 
officers, regarded the Empire as an abstract concept that bore little 
relation to their own lives. Russian peasants were equally indifferent. 
Slav nationalism was a matter for the urban intelligentsia, and they 
did not believe that German forces threatened their own villages, 
hundreds of miles behind the lines. 
Non-commissioned officers were the linchpins of army discipline. 
British soldiers were forbidden to approach an officer without an 
NCO being present. The extent to which NCOs maintained their 
authority depended partly on military traditions, but also depended 
on the society from which such men were drawn. Most western 
European countries had a large reservoir of artisans, foremen, petty 
clerks and peasants with farms large enough to require the hiring of 
outside labour: 40 per cent of German NCOs were artisans. As such 
men had some experience of giving orders and of co-operating with 
their social superiors, it was relatively easy to turn them into corpo¬ 
rals and sergeants. Russia, on the other hand, had few such people. 
Most of her soldiers were peasants and only 3 per cent of them hired 
labour.13 The Russian army had only one-third as many NCOs, as a 
proportion of its total size, as the German army.14 This lack does 
much to explain the fact that discipline in the Russian army was to 
break down so badly in 1917. 
The fluidity of war in Russia, central Europe and Italy meant that 
it was more difficult to contain desertion and disobedience. In the 
The Great War 
59 
aftermath of defeat at Caporetto, more than 350,000 Italian deserters 
and refugees wandered around the countryside.15 In Austria- 
Hungary, hundreds of thousands of men deserted (44,000 were 
arrested in the first three months of 1918 alone).16 Far from being 
stuck in one place under close supervision, Russian soldiers often 
moved around the front line, and eventually away from it, as looting 
and ill discipline turned to desertion or mutiny.17 
Mobile warfare meant the capture of large numbers of prisoners, 
which contributed to desertion and low morale. The number of pris¬ 
oners captured from the Habsburg army (2.2 million) was more than 
twelve times that of prisoners taken from the British army (170,389) 
and more than four times the number from the French (500,000).18 
Captured men constituted less than a tenth of total British casualties, 
but roughly a third of all casualties from the Habsburg army and 
more than half of all casualties in the Russian army: prisoners taken 
by Austria-Hungary or Russia endured harsh conditions because their 
captors were already short of food. Furthermore, commanders of 
some armies regarded their own soldiers who had been taken pris¬ 
oner with suspicion (surrendering Russians were sometimes shelled 
by their own forces).19 The Italian government refused to provide 
adequate Red Cross parcels for its prisoners (100,000 out of 600,000 
died in Austrian captivity).20 Returning prisoners were bitter, which 
caused particular problems in Austria-Hungary, where over half a 
million prisoners came back from Russia after the Treaty of Brest- 
Litovsk in March 1918. Former prisoners had often been influenced 
by Bolshevik propaganda and Austrian authorities treated them with 
suspicion. Many deserted.21 
The anarchy of the eastern front was illustrated by the Czechoslovak 
corps, which was composed of men who had been in Russia in 1914 
and had decided to fight with the Russians in the hope of liberating 
their homeland from Habsburg rule. Swelled by prisoners of war, their 
numbers reached 40,000 in March 1918. In May, members of the 
corps, waiting to be sent home, got into a brawl with Hungarian pris¬ 
oners of war. The Soviet authorities attempted to disarm the Czechs, 
who fought back. Consequently Czech soldiers, who had initially 
wanted nothing other than to escape from Russia, became an impor¬ 
tant element of the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War. 
60 
A History in Fragments 
Politics 
The military exercised great power in most European countries before 
1914 - ministers of war had often been soldiers - and the extent of 
this influence reached new heights in the early stages of the war. 
France was virtually under military rule for several months. Military 
legislation in France had been drawn up on the assumption that the 
army would advance into enemy territory, and when the Germans 
advanced into France large parts of the country were defined as ‘zones 
of military occupation’ and ruled in a manner that had been devised 
for a conquered enemy. Military power was reinforced when the civil¬ 
ian government fled to Bordeaux to escape the invading Germans.22 
In Great Britain, General Kitchener was Minister of War from 1914 to 
1916. However, in both Britain and France the battle for control of the 
war was ultimately won by civilians. In France, Georges Clemenceau, 
a bitter critic of military tactics during the first three years of the 
war, became Prime Minister and Minister of War in 1917. A man of 
enormous energy, he was determined to assert his authority over the 
generals for whom, as a former Dreyfusard, he had no great respect. 
In Britain, a similar role was played by David Lloyd George, \vho 
became Prime Minister in December 1916. Like Clemenceau, Lloyd 
George had great self-confidence and the vestiges of a radical past that 
made him dubious about the generals’ capacity to win the war 
(though not about the desirability of their doing so). In Germany, 
civilian control was less effective - the military had been sheltered 
from parliamentary scrutiny by the influence of the Kaiser. When 
war broke out the Kaiser was elbowed aside and the generals gained a 
control over almost all areas of life that they did not relinquish until 
the very end of the war. Whereas Clemenceau and Lloyd George were 
flamboyant, dynamic men from outside the establishment, Georg 
Michaelis, who replaced Bethmann Hollweg as Chancellor in July 
1917, was a colourless civil servant. Charles de Gaulle, observing 
affairs from the vantage point of a German prison camp, concluded 
that the need for civilian politicians to keep control of the military 
was the most important lesson of German failure in the war. 
Struggles over the war spilled out of Cabinet rooms. In Britain 
and France, popular politics played into the hands of effective 
The Great War 
61 
democratic politicians such as Lloyd George and Clemenceau. In 
Germany matters were more complicated. The SPD became increas¬ 
ingly dubious about the war and eventually a group of socialists broke 
away to call for peace. Meanwhile the military establishment itself 
dabbled in popular politics. Vast quantities of official propaganda 
were distributed, and in 1917 Admiral von Tirpitz founded the 
Fatherland Party, which soon acquired 1.25 million members and 
overtook the SPD as the largest party. In Russia and Austria-Hungary 
popular politics were more threatening because a large part of the 
population was unsympathetic to the war. 
Popular politics raised the spectre of nationalism. Britain and 
France were little troubled by this. Bretons fought loyally for a state 
with which they did not even share a language - one was shot by his 
own comrades because of his inability to explain his presence behind 
the lines. Welsh speakers flooded into the British army after Lloyd 
George became Minister of Munitions and persuaded the chapels to 
abandon their opposition to the war. Only the Irish presented prob¬ 
lems. Conscription was never introduced in Ireland, or in Australia, 
where much of the population was of Irish origin. At Easter 1916, the 
Germans gave some help to an unsuccessful rising in Dublin. 
In eastern Europe, things were different. The Austrian decision to 
enter the war was provoked partly by fear of nationalism. Some lead¬ 
ers of national minorities appreciated that the war gave them a chance 
to overthrow foreign domination: Tomas Masaryk sought support in 
Britain and the United States for a new Czech state, while in Finland 
Carl Gustav Mannerheim, an officer trained in Russia, fought with 
the Russians. Poles had an awkward choice, because some of them 
lived in the Tsarist Empire while others lived in Austria-Hungary. 
Jozef Pilsudski, another former Russian officer, fought with the 
Austro-Hungarian army for as long as he believed that to do so served 
Polish interests, but the Polish national democrats supported Russia 
against the Central Powers. Germany and Austria-Hungary declared 
themselves in favour of an independent Polish state in November 
1916; in the summer of 1918, the Allies called for a broader state that 
would encompass parts of the Russian, German and Habsburg 
empires. The defeat of Russia, a multinational empire, and the entry 
into the war of America, a country populated largely by national 
62 
A History in Fragments 
minorities from the central European empires, meant that Britain 
and France were increasingly prone to present their war as one of 
national liberation.23 
Economic management 
Initially it was assumed that the war would be short and that eco¬ 
nomics would play little part in its outcome. The length of the war 
and the scale of resources deployed overturned this assumption, and 
the transformation of economic management was one of the most 
dramatic ways in which the war affected Europe. 
War production meant breaking with the pre-war tradition of 
laissez-faire. The state became the most important customer for many 
companies, which meant that the state itself underwent dramatic 
changes. In France, the total number of government servants 
increased from 800,000 in 1914 to 1.25 million by 1926.24 
Dealings with the state encouraged businessmen to develop new 
forms of organisation. In France, the Parisian metallurgical and 
mechanical producers grouped themselves together in 1917, and by 
the end of the war firms belonging to the association employed 
almost 200,000 workers. In Germany, 200 war associations, employ¬ 
ing a total of 33,000 people, had been formed by 1918.25 Firms 
bought shares in the associations, which then distributed scarce 
resources among their members. In the absence of a strong state, 
business could acquire great power. In France, during the early part 
of the war, the ironmasters’ association was granted the sole right 
to distribute iron and steel.26 In occupied Belgium, the Societe 
Generate bank was so powerful that it effectively issued its own 
currency. 
Business did not always have things its own way. State bureaucracy 
became more powerful in all countries as the war went on, and trade 
unions could also limit activities. This was most conspicuous in 
Britain, where the engineering trade union imposed strict conditions 
under which new working practices would be permitted for the dura¬ 
tion of the war. In France and Germany, union representatives gained 
ever greater influence in official bodies as the war went on. In 
The Great War 
63 
Germany, ‘yellow’ unions, sponsored by employers, gained ground 
between 1915 and 1916, but thereafter independent unions increased 
their membership at a faster rate. The 1916 Auxiliary Service Law 
established factory committees to which union representatives were 
elected by secret ballot.27 
Particular trade union leaders, state bureaucrats and leaders of 
industrial syndicates often acquired such similar outlooks that they 
seemed to have been fused into a new industrial ruling class, espous¬ 
ing policies that did not fit the normal aims of governments, workers 
or industrialists. Men like the French minister Albert Thomas or 
the German industrialist-turned-civil servant Walther Rathenau 
dreamed of a new industrial order based on co-ordination and co¬ 
operation. 
Generally the companies that did well in the war were large, partly 
because the industries needed by a war economy had to operate on a 
large scale and also because large companies had the contacts, expe¬ 
rience and personnel to gain from an organised economy. Some 
companies that profited from the war expanded dramatically - 
Renault became the largest company in France - while mergers 
brought firms together into larger conglomerations, such as the 
German chemicals combine, formed in 1916, that eventually became 
IG Farben. French legislation was eased to make the formation of 
cartels easier.28 Conversely, small businesses did badly, as they often 
produced consumer goods that were regarded as dispensable and 
lacked the means to lobby for protection. Half a million German arti¬ 
sans were drafted into the army, and one in three artisanal enterprises 
was shut down.29 
Countries that had neither an extensive industrial base nor tradi¬ 
tions of organisation often found that economic mobilisation 
brought political instability. Italian industrialists who were unable to 
adapt to the restoration of liberalism supported Fascism in the early 
1920s. In Russia, War Industry Committees sought a political power 
to match their economic one: Prince Lvov, the first head of the pro¬ 
visional government established after the February Revolution, had 
been a member of the central War Industry Committee. 
64 
A History in Fragments 
Civilians 
Civilian living standards varied from one combatant country to 
another and from one social group to another. Living standards held 
up best in Britain and France. France was probably the most agricul¬ 
turally prosperous nation in Europe, though part of its most 
productive land had been taken over by battlefields, and Britain was 
able, for most of the time, to import food. British civilians were 
almost entirely spared the direct impact of enemy action, while for 
French civilians fighting was static and confined to a limited area: 
they did not face the marauding armies that had spread disease and 
requisitioned food in earlier wars. In Great Britain, life expectancy 
among civilians increased, while in France it remained at about the 
same level as before the war.30 
Civilians elsewhere had less happy experiences. Numerous strikes 
and disturbances throughout Europe in 1917 were provoked by food 
shortages: hunger was said to lie behind almost three-quarters of 
strikes in Austria.31 The diversion of resources away from agriculture, 
the poor harvests of 1916 and the British blockade of the Central 
Powers all reduced the amount of food available. Russia suffered 
because its railway system, overloaded by the demands of the army, 
failed to transport enough food to the cities, while Belgium faced the 
consequences of invasion and occupation by a power that was itself 
short of resources. A German who tried to live off official rations 
between November 1916 and May 1917 lost one-fifth of his body 
weight.32 Few Germans starved to death during this period, but 
hunger exacerbated other problems. Civilians wasted hours queuing 
or in complicated black market operations, changed their diet to 
include unpopular items such as turnips, and were made more vul¬ 
nerable to infection (over 200,000 Germans died in the influenza 
epidemic of 1918).33 
The countries of central and eastern Europe suffered worst. 
Fighting was not confined to small areas, and the direct impact of the 
war on the civilian population was considerable. In Serbia, disease, 
famine and the movement of refugees resulted in terrible suffering 
throughout the population: one in ten Serbs died during a typhus 
epidemic. Half a million Serbs fled the Austrian advance in a march to 
The Great War 
65 
the Adriatic, and almost half of them died on the journey.34 In 
Bulgaria, requisition of food by the German and Austrian armies in 
1916 caused starvation,35 while in Poland 40,000 died of typhus.36 
The worst civilian suffering of all occurred in Turkey. The 
Armenian population, which the authorities believed to be sympa¬ 
thetic to the Russians, was subjected to ever increasing persecution. 
Armenians in the east of the country were caught in fighting between 
Turkish and Russian forces and around 200,000 Armenians were 
obliged to seek refuge in Russia. Others were massacred or had to 
undertake forced marches without food or water. By the end of 1916, 
foreign observers estimated that only about 600,000 Armenians from 
a population of between 1,800,000 and 2,100,000 had survived.37 
Early in the war, workers, like other economic resources, were dis¬ 
regarded. Factories throughout Europe were drained of manpower by 
recruiting sergeants. Gradually, this changed. In France, 500,000 
workers had returned from the front by the end of 1915,38 and in 
January 1916, the French metallurgy industry employed the same 
number of people as before the war. Some workers benefited from 
employers’ need to retain and motivate their staff at a time when 
labour was so scarce. In France, pay for armament workers increased 
faster than inflation, while that of other workers fell behind. 
The experience of peasants, the largest single social group in most 
European countries, was mixed. Generals in continental countries 
regarded peasants as the best soldiers, but in spite, or because, of this 
many peasants were hostile to war. Conservatives saw peasants as 
patriotic because they were rarely touched by socialist propaganda, 
but forgot that they were also often untouched by the nationalist 
propaganda that had been so widespread in cities before 1914. Many 
peasants regarded the state as an alien body with which they came 
into contact only when it collected taxes or conscripted their sons. 
The outbreak of war in 1914 was particularly resented because it 
came immediately before the harvest.39 
Most evidence suggests that the countryside was unenthusiastic 
about, if not hostile to, mobilisation. The Belgian historian Pirenne 
described his country thus: Almost all [volunteers] belonged to the 
urban population. The countryside only took a slight part in this 
movement. The moral commotion provoked by the war could not 
66 
A History in Fragments 
shake it as much as it did the intellectual and industrial classes, which 
were more sensitive, more nervous and more vulnerable to patriotic 
idealism and, furthermore, more directly affected by the brutal inter¬ 
ruption of business and more intimately tied up with national life.’40 
Reports by French village schoolteachers showed the trepidation 
with which many peasants went to war. In Bulgaria, opposition to 
entry into the war was directed by the peasant leader Alexander 
Stamboliski.41 
Hostility to the war rarely translated into peasant support for rev¬ 
olution in western and central Europe. There was an economic reason 
for this. The price of food rose sharply because imports were lost 
and armies needed to feed large numbers of men. Furthermore, peas¬ 
ants often profited from inflation when paying off debt: in France, a 
large part of the 10-20 billion francs of agricultural debt owed in 
1914 had been cleared by 1918.42 Peasants in Germany and Austria 
drew particular benefits from wartime inflation because they had 
often borrowed money to buy new equipment before the war: about 
13 billion marks of agricultural debt was wiped out in the German 
inflation that began in the First World War and reached a peak in the 
early 1920s.43 Sharecroppers and tenants in Italy gained because fhey 
usually bought seed and fertiliser in the high season and paid their 
debts in arrears during the low season;44 they used wartime prosper¬ 
ity to buy land - the number of proprietors increased from 2.25 
million in 1911 to over 4 million in 1921.45 
The fate of the Russian peasantry was quite different. The break¬ 
down of the railway system for transporting grain to cities and the 
activities of rapacious middlemen prevented the peasants from ben¬ 
efiting from inflated food prices; indeed, the price for which they 
sold their food failed to keep up with the price of tools and other 
commodities. The collapse of rural industries also hurt the peasants. 
Furthermore, as the Russian peasantry had rarely borrowed money 
before 1914, because the commune system provided them little incen¬ 
tive to improve their land, peasants who were losing from inflation 
often retreated from the market economy altogether and resorted to 
subsistence farming. This exacerbated the food crisis in the cities that 
helped to spark revolution in 1917. In western and central Europe, 
peasants, who had derived at least some economic benefit from the 
The Great War 
67 
war, fought for counter-revolution; in Russia, they remained indif¬ 
ferent or supported the Bolsheviks. 
Defeats 
In Russia, defeat and revolution went together. Defeat provoked 
mutiny, which in turn made defeat more likely. Major mutinies began 
in the autumn of 1916; the following February, soldiers joined riots 
and strikes that they had been sent to suppress. Generals persuaded 
the Tsar to abdicate, in the hope that this would make it easier to 
prosecute the war. Almost all major political leaders agreed that 
the war must be continued, the policy followed by the provisional 
government under Prince Lvov. 
In practice, the provisional government’s control of the army was 
weak, with many soldiers refusing to recognise the authority of their 
officers. The Petrograd Soviet, which claimed to represent workers of 
the capital, provided a rival for the government. Its ‘order number 
one’ called for the establishment of soldiers’ committees, and it 
declared that government orders were only valid if authorised by the 
Soviet. The Germans took advantage of the chaos by transporting 
Lenin, the most radical leader of the most radical party, the 
Bolsheviks, from Switzerland to Russia. Lenin’s arrival did not settle 
matters. In spite of‘order number one’, the majority of members of 
the Petrograd Soviet did not want to displace the provisional govern¬ 
ment. However, in June and July, Alexander Kerensky, the Minister of 
War who became Prime Minister on 25 July, ordered an offensive in 
Galicia. The Russian army, which had done little fighting for the 
past year, was badly defeated, sustaining 200,000 casualties. Mutinous 
soldiers and sailors flooded into the capital in July, and in August 
General Kornilov sent troops into the city in an unsuccessful bid 
to restore order. Military discipline collapsed. General Alekseev 
admitted that, ‘practically speaking... we have no army’.46 In October 
1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional govern¬ 
ment with a pledge to secure peace. The Russians signed an armistice 
with Germany in December, and in March 1918 conceded vast tracts 
of territory under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. 
68 
A History in Fragments 
Germany’s defeat was less dramatic than that of Russia. It was a 
product of attrition. Efficient organisation could not disguise the fact 
that Germany had fewer resources than her opponents, especially 
after America joined the Allies. In 1918, it became clear that Germany 
would not be able to sustain the confrontation. Her response was to 
try to break out of trench warfare with an offensive in March 1918. 
Many of the military assumptions that had governed fighting on the 
western front for the past four years were abandoned. Both sides had 
been experimenting with new kinds of assault for some time: instead 
of using vast numbers of ordinary troops who staggered under the 
weight of their equipment, small numbers of soldiers were trained to 
move quickly using light weapons such as machine pistols. In 1916, 
the Germans established battalions of‘storm troopers’ to implement 
such techniques, and in 1918 offensive tactics were applied on a wider 
scale. One hundred divisions were allocated to defensive duties, while 
around seventy stronger divisions were allocated to an attack that 
was to be closely co-ordinated with artillery barrage, poison gas and 
the use of aircraft. 
The new tactics achieved striking results. Allied lines were driven 
back thirty miles and, for a time, the Germans seemed to threaten 
Paris, as they had in 1914. But the Germans became victims of their 
own success. Infantry troops were left exposed as artillery and 
machine guns were unable to keep up with them: German forces 
were ninety miles from their railheads. In addition, the Germans suf¬ 
fered from the very problems of shortage that had made them so 
keen to escape from a long war of attrition. They did not have enough 
men, a problem exacerbated by the fact that so many soldiers were 
tied down holding the vast territories in the east that Germany had 
acquired at Brest-Litovsk. Hunger and exhaustion sapped the energy 
of German troops, and half a million of them were incapacitated by 
Spanish influenza. The tight discipline that had marked static warfare 
on the western front began to break down as soldiers advanced so fast 
that they often lost contact with their officers. 
The Germans also fell victim to the strategic naivety of their com¬ 
mander. Ludendorff wanted a rapid advance but was not sure what to 
do with it. He hesitated between driving the British forces back to the 
Channel or trying to take Paris, eventually opting for the latter. In 
The Great War 
69 
July, the French commander, Marshal Foch, counterattacked. He too 
adopted more mobile tactics. Tanks - a weapon that the Germans had 
never really exploited - and planes were used, and fresh American 
troops were thrown into the battle. The Germans suffered 340,000 
casualties. They retreated in chaos and, significantly, began to suffer 
from large-scale desertion.47 By mid-August, German leaders knew 
that the war was lost; by October, the Habsburg Empire was breaking 
up as subject peoples declared their independence and on 11 
November the armistice ended fighting in the west. 
Conclusion 
The United States, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Romania, Serbia, 
Portugal and Greece were recognised as victors in the negotiations 
that took place after the end of the Great War; Germany, Austria- 
Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria were the losers. Russia 
took no part in post-war negotiations, and only part of the vast ter¬ 
ritories lost at Brest-Litovsk were restored to her. In purely territorial 
terms, the biggest winner was Romania, and several countries - 
Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia - that had not existed in 1914 
were created. In many respects, however, the emphasis on territory 
that dominated post-war discussions was a red herring. The country 
that most increased its power, the United States, gained no territory at 
all, while Britain gained no territory in Europe, and France acquired 
a comparatively small amount (Alsace and Lorraine). 
The real questions concerned the internal orders of European 
countries, and the answers to such questions transcended national 
frontiers. Some workers, peasants and large-scale industrialists drew 
economic benefits from the war, while artisans and rentiers lost out. 
In each of these cases, however, economic gains were matched by 
physical losses caused by the war itself (in the case of the peasantry) 
or by the political instability that followed the war. 
If national interest and internal order are considered together, then 
the winners and losers of the First World War are redefined. Romania 
may have been the largest gainer in terms of land, but she can hardly 
be said to have gained prosperity or political stability following 1919. 
70 
A History in Fragments 
Table 2: Military Deaths in the First World War 
France 
Italy 
Britain 
Serbia 
Russia 
Germany 
Turkey 
1,398,000 
578,000 
723,000 
278,000 
1,811,000 
2,037,000 
Belgium 
Portugal 
Romania 
Greece 
Bulgaria 
38,000 
7,000 
250,000 
26,000 
88,000 
Austria-Hungary 1,100,000 
804,000 
Source: Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (1998), p. 295. This table 
includes military deaths from disease as well as action but not civilian 
deaths. 
Italy was also destabilised, not only because the gains that she made 
from participation in the war were less than her leaders had hoped 
for, but also because the war had imposed such social and economic 
strains. Austria-Hungary saw both the break-up of the empire and 
social turmoil, which led briefly to Bolshevik revolution in Budapest. 
Germany’s experience was more mixed. In some ways, German soci¬ 
ety held together remarkably well: soldiers did not mutiny before 
November 1918, and workers did not rebel. German economic organ¬ 
isation was good. On the other hand, Germany’s inability to support 
a long war of attrition was reflected in inflation and, eventually, 
famine. Defeat and demobilisation brought a breakdown of the order 
that had been preserved for the previous four years and was reflected 
in the loss of equipment. During 1918 and 1919, 1,895,000 rifles, 
8,542 machine guns and 4,000 trench mortars went missing.48 
However, in Germany the overthrow of the old order was primarily 
political - the deposition of the Kaiser. It did not involve the destruc¬ 
tion of entire classes, as in Russia. Many of the foundations on which 
the German war effort was built (such as the compromise between 
large-scale industry, organised labour and the army) survived until 
1933, and perhaps beyond. 
The upheaval of war did not always end with the armistice. In 
Russia, 1.8 million died fighting the Central Powers compared with 
around 5 million who died in the famine of 1921-22.49 The contin¬ 
ued Allied blockade ensured that the suffering of German civilians 
The Great War 
71 
between November 1918 and the conclusion of the peace treaty in 
1919 was probably greater than it had been during the war itself. The 
long-term impact of wartime expenditure was often reflected in post¬ 
war inflation, notably that which racked Germany in 1923. 
In terms of the damage they sustained, Britain and France got off 
comparatively lightly from the Great War. There was no revolution, 
no hyper-inflation, no starvation and no plague. In some ways, of 
course, such a conclusion merely reveals how badly .everyone suf¬ 
fered. Britain and France may have endured less than other European 
participants, but they still lost more men between 1914 and 1918 
than in any other war in history (respectively 1.6 per cent and 3.4 per 
cent of their populations).50 Many French people concluded that the 
rapid defeat of the Franco-Prussian War had been less unpleasant 
than the slow victory of the Great War, and this does much to explain 
their behaviour in June 1940. 
The suggestion that Britain and France lost least from the Great 
War seems odd in view of the intense public regret about the war 
expressed in both countries during the 1920s and 1930s. In part, such 
regret springs from the very sense that the war was divided from 
‘normal life’. Soldiers were bitter about suffering that contrasted so 
sharply with the relative tranquillity of civilian life. For Russians, the 
war was merely one element in a period of upheaval that lasted from 
at least 1905 until at least 1953; in Britain, by contrast, it seemed like 
an avoidable parenthesis. 
For the British, the war had been essentially defensive. It had been 
designed to preserve the status quo. Since they had nothing to gain, 
even victory was bound in the long run to seem like the beginning of 
decline. This was particularly true in terms of overseas empire. Britain 
commanded even larger areas after 1919 than she had before 1914, but 
the war sapped her economic capacity to maintain such a position. 
In social terms, the British and the French bourgeoisie had special 
reason to regret the war because it destroyed the stable world of 
secure investments and low inflation that many of them - those most 
likely to record their experience in writing - had enjoyed before 1914. 
In eastern and central Europe, by contrast, the drama of the 
First World War meant that people were less likely to look back on the 
pre-1914 world with nostalgia. It had brought a new world into being, 
72 
A History in Fragments 
and the old world was now unimaginable. The end of the war did not 
bring a return to ‘normal’, because ‘normality’ had been destroyed. A 
leader of the German SA wrote that his comrades ‘marched on to the 
battlefields of the post-war world just as we had gone into battle on 
the western front’.51 A Hungarian politician, discussing the prospect 
that his country’s anti-Semitism might attract international dis¬ 
approval, remarked, ‘If we’ll be accused of being inhuman, or 
reactionary, these slogans will not move us anymore. The best values 
of the Hungarian nation have been burnt in the fire of world confla¬ 
gration.’52 Fascists, Bolsheviks, Nazis and nationalists in the newly 
created states had all suffered in the war, but they knew that the insti¬ 
tutions, movements and states that they supported had come out of 
that war. The British dreamed of a highly mythologised pre-war idyll 
in which the clock was stopped at ten to three. For most of Europe, 
the clock could never be stopped, and the only way forward was into 
new violence that would often dwarf that of 1914-18.

Summarize this long and detailed