The First World War (1914-1918) began in early August 1914, over a month after Serbian nationalists assassinated the reform-minded Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Though Sarajevo proved to be the spark that ignited the war, the causes were much more complex and certainly more controversial, even today.
In the short-term, the popular notions of Germany’s “blank check” to the Austrian-Hungarian empire to deal with Serbia as they saw fit coupled with the complex mobilization and intertwined and secretive alliance systems of the period certainly contributed to the coming disaster. However, other, more long-term and complex issues contributed to the catastrophe recognized even by contemporaries as “The Great War.”
The French, smarting from their defeat at the hands of the Germans in 1870, had longed for the return of Alsace-Lorraine, lost to the newly formed (1870) and increasingly powerful German state at the end of the Franco-Prussian war.
Great Britain, concerned over the growth of both Germany’s colonies and the Kaiser’s Navy (and a participant in the naval arms race that began in 1906) had strategic concerns over Germany’s increasingly boisterous and aggressive militarism. Once Germany over-ran Belgium, Brussels asked for British support based on the 1839 Treaty of London, which guaranteed British support of Belgium’s neutrality in case of war. Though Berlin had asked London to ignore this “scrap of paper,” London refused and Germany, intent on destroying the French military in a great flanking maneuver (the Schlieffen Plan) ignored the Asquith government’s rejection and invaded anyway.
For its part Germany suspected French intrigues to regain Alsace-Lorraine and had its own Alliance system (with Austria-Hungary, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire) to maintain. Imperial Germany also of had it’s own internal pressures to conduct what Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s government may have believed to be a preventative war with the hope of securing an overseas empire to satisfy the desires of an increasingly influential German middle class.
Austria-Hungary, considered by many to be a dying empire (along with the Ottoman’s), in part because of her lack of imperial possessions and colonies outside of Europe, looked to expand south into the Balkans to renew Hapsburg glory and, ultimately, credibility. Checked by a growing and increasingly hostile Serbia, who was likely emboldened by its alliance with Imperial Russia, the Austrian monarchy recognized it needed Germany to offset this Slavic alliance.
Russia, defeated at the hands of the Japanese in the overlooked 1905 Russo-Japanese war, had an interest in gaining influence in the Balkans, if for no other reason to block Austrian-Hungarian expansion.
All expected a short war, for none had understood the military lessons from either the Russo-Japanese or the American Civil Wars. All expected victory and a triumphal return home by Christmas. The results proved otherwise. Though the exact figures will never be known, it’s estimated that the war resulted in 37 million casualties. Machines made a mockery of heroes, and a generation was lost in the trenches.
The United States’ late entry into the war may well have reflected the triumph of national interests over the often cumbersome and sometimes inconvenient rule of law. Though much of the country, to include President Woodrow Wilson, desired to remain neutral and continue to trade with all parties, the British blockade of Imperial Germany made such a position impractical. The United States was not in a position to enforce its neutrality with all belligerents and, with an emotional belief that we should support other democratic powers, the US soon slipped into the British camp.
The Germans recognized immediately that US trade with Britain could prolong the war and forestall what they believed would be their inevitable victory. In February 1915 the Germans took decisive action to interdict this trade and initiated unrestricted submarine warfare against US and Allied shipping in the Atlantic. The unfortunate result was a crisis both between the US and Germany and inside the US administration. The sinking of such passenger ships as the Lusitania and the Sussex, along with Washington’s diplomatic reaction, led the Germans to conduct on-again-off-again campaigns to stop the by now increasing and vital trans-Atlantic trade between the Allies (especially Great Britain) and the United States. President Wilson, willing to deal harshly with Berlin, was unwilling to meaningfully condemn London’s blockade, As a result, Williams Jennings Bryan, the US Secretary of State, resigned in protest. Despite this short-term setback and spurred on by Allied propaganda (“poor little” Belgium and “poor little” Serbia) and the discovery of the German’s diplomatic blunder in Mexico (the Zimmerman Telegram), the United States finally declared war on Imperial Germany and its allies on April 6, 1917.
The gruesome tragedy of trench warfare spawned what many now consider to have been a renaissance in English literature that represented the transition from prosaic Georgian poetry to a personal, realistic verse found in the writings of Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edmund Blunden. All these contributed not only to our emotional understanding of war through verse but made significant contributions to 20th Century western literature.
Recommended Reading List:
Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That (his war-time autobiography)
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (his wartime semi-autobiographical novel written as part of the memoirs of George Sherston)
Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake (his autobiography)
Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War
Wilfred Owens, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, ed by John Stallworthy
Though historians have not always captured the emotions of war as well as the poets, many have produced fine narrative works that prove more readable than some purely academic writings. Here are a few recommendations:
Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
John Toland, No Man’s Land
Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia
Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought
Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel
Other Suggested Readings:
James L. Stokesbury, A Short History of World War One
John Terraine, The First World War
John Keegan, The First World War
Michael Howard, The First World War
David Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer
Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse
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