Ring of Steel Read online

  Ring of Steel

  Copyright © 2014 by Alexander Watson

  Published by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  Published in 2014 in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.

  Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810–4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  LCCN: 2014943628

  ISBN (ebook): 978-0-465-05687-3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Ania

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1.Decisions for War

  2.Mobilizing the People

  3.War of Illusions

  4.The War of Defence

  5.Encirclement

  6.Security for All Time

  7.Crisis at the Front

  8.Deprivation

  9.Remobilization

  10.U-Boats

  11.Dangerous Ideas

  12.The Bread Peace

  13.Collapse

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1.‘I did not want this!’ Kaiser Wilhelm II denies responsibility for the war. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  2.Civil Railway Watchmen and war volunteers in Göttingen, 5 September 1914. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  3.‘Campaign of 1914. Marianne’s Punishment’. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  4.‘Beginning of August 1914. Deportation of francs tireurs’. (Photograph, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg: MSg 200/2072)

  5.Austro-Hungarian troops hang a civilian in Galicia, 1914. (Photograph from T. A. Innes and I. Castle, Covenants with Death (London: Daily Express Publications, 1934))

  6.Ruthenes being forcibly deported westwards, autumn 1914 or early 1915. (Photograph, Bildarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna: Pk 3002, 7833)

  7.The Russian army parades in Insterburg, East Prussia, 3 September 1914. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  8.Refugees hurry to Allenstein’s railway station, summer 1914. (Photograph from Die Russenherrschaft in Ostpreußen und ihr Ende (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1915), p. 239)

  9.German civilians massacred by the Russian army, March 1915. (Photograph from L. Stallings, The First World War. A Photographic History (London: Daily Express Publications, 1933), p. 58)

  10.‘The Iron Hindenburg of Berlin’. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  11.‘The Iron Knight’ in Hermannstadt (Sibiu). (Photograph, Muzeul National Brukenthal, Sibiu)

  12.‘The Column of the Legions’ in Cracow. (Painting by Stanisław Tondos, 1915, Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa: 3787/III)

  13.Children express the German nation’s hatred of Britain. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  14.German soldiers receiving food from Red Cross helpers, 1914. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  15.The ‘Fortress Peace’. The Reich’s proletariat arrays behind Germania. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  16.Queuing to buy food in Cracow in 1916. (Painting by K. Bąkowski, 1916, Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa: 2459/III)

  17.Austro-Hungarian soldiers on the Eastern Front, June 1916. (Photograph, Archive of Modern Conflict, London: 4464)

  18.An Austro-Hungarian field service postcard. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  19.German troops in training behind the Eastern Front, spring 1916. (Photograph from the album of Alfred Hammer, a soldier in Magdeburg Jäger Battalion Nr. 4, author’s collection)

  20.A German military pun: discipline and battle (Postcard, author’s collection)

  21.A German U-boat crew on the High Seas. (Photograph, Archive of Modern Conflict, London: 14515)

  22.Allied merchant seamen surrender in their lifeboats. (Photograph, Archive of Modern Conflict, London: 14500)

  23.A U-boat torpedoes an Allied merchant vessel. (Photograph, Archive of Modern Conflict, London: 14515)

  24.‘Who is the Victor?’ (Poster, Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu: Polizei-Präsidium 5024: fo. 196)

  25.The German self-image as occupiers. (Postcard, author’s collection)

  26.German prisoners taken at the Battle of St Quentin Canal, 2 October 1918. (Photograph, Imperial War Museum, London: Q 9353)

  27.Corpses on the Italian Front (Photograph, author’s collection)

  28.Revolutionaries on the streets of Berlin, 9 or 10 November 1918. (Photograph, Imperial War Museum, London: Q 52732)

  29.A woman mourns her fallen husband. (Postcard, Author’s Collection)

  List of Maps

  1.Europe

  2.The Western Front

  3.The Russian Invasion of East Prussia, 1914

  4.The Eastern Front

  5.The Balkans

  6.Ober Ost and Poland

  Acknowledgements

  While writing this book, I have been the beneficiary of many acts of great kindness. My first thanks are to David Stevenson for recommending me to Penguin to write the book, and to Niall Ferguson, who taught me a good deal of what I know about writing history. I am extremely grateful to my editors, Simon Winder and Lara Heimert. Simon approached me with the exciting idea of a history of the war from the Central Powers’ perspectives, and ever since my first book proposal he has been a source of inspiration and uplift. From Lara, I received immensely valuable feedback, which greatly improved my manuscript. Both have shown superhuman levels of patience and understanding.

  Over the past six years, I have been fortunate to work at three excellent institutions, the University of Cambridge, the University of Warsaw and Goldsmiths, University of London. My colleagues there and in other places have been extremely supportive. I am especially grateful to Bernhard Fulda for many thought-provoking conversations, for his hospitality in Berlin, and above all for reading and giving detailed feedback on the bulk of the manuscript at very short notice. Other friends and colleagues were also generous with their time. Jonathan Gumz, Stephan Lehnstaedt and Richard Grayson all read and provided incisive comments on individual chapters. I owe thanks to Piotr Szlanta for helping me integrate into Warsaw academic life, and to Philipp Stiasny for providing material on films and for always being such a generous and exuberant host whenever I visit Berlin. Anatol Schmied-Kowarzik also kindly sent me material. John Deak taught me how to find my way through the maze of files in the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, and Tim Buchen pointed me in the direction of valuable sources from Jerusalem. At Goldsmiths, I am extremely grateful to Jan Plamper, Richard Grayson and Stephen Pigney for rescheduling teaching and putting themselves to inconvenience so that I could finish my manuscript. More generally, I wish to thank Heather Jones, Holger Afflerbach, Peter Holquist, Nathaniel Wood, Alan Kramer, John Horne, Jens Boysen, Julia Eichenberg, Jonathan Boff, Jarosław Centek, Brian Feltman, Tom Weber and Hugo Service for conversations that have helped shape my view of the First World War, and especially the experience of it in east-central Europe. Lastly, I am grateful to those senior colleagues who have supported me at critical moments during the last decade, most especially Sir Hew Strachan, Christopher Clark, Sir Richard Evans, Rich
ard Bessel and Tomasz Kizwalter.

  The research for this book could not have been undertaken without support and opportunities offered by funding bodies. A British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship supported me at Cambridge University between 2008 and 2011, an experience that I value as one of the most exciting and intellectually stimulating of my life. The research funds that came with the Fellowship permitted visits to archives in Poland, Austria and Germany. In 2011–13, I held a 7th European Community Framework Programme Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (No. PIEF-GA-2010-274914). The work that I undertook was for a different project, but I still owe the European Commission thanks here. There are few other opportunities for a British academic to spend two years on the other side of Europe, and without this grant it would have been far more difficult to improve my Polish language skills and impossible to gain the same familiarity with Poland’s excellent libraries and superlatively organized and stocked archives. I also would not have had the chance to work at Warsaw University’s Institute of History, an experience that taught me much and made me a better historian. I am sincerely grateful. Lastly, I thank the Institute of Historical Research in London for a Scouloudi Historical Award. This funded preliminary archival research in 2008.

  There are two groups of professionals to whom I owe thanks. The first are archivists. To write this book I used material from archives in five countries. I am extremely grateful to the staff of the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart; the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde; the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg; the Deutsches Tagebucharchiv, Emmendingen; the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe; the Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden; the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; the Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Wiesbaden; the Österreichisches Staatsarchiv; the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem; the Archiwum Archidiecezjalne w Poznaniu; the Archiwum Narodowe w Krakowie; the Archiwum Państwowe w Katowicach: Oddział w Raciborzu; the Archiwum Państwowe w Olsztynie; the Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu; the Archiwum Państwowe w Toruniu; the Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw; and the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives in London. Additionally, I would like to thank the ever-friendly and helpful staff of the Archive of Modern Conflict, London; the Museum Historyczne Miasta Krakowa; the Muzeul National Brukenthal, Sibiu; and the Bildarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, for providing many of the photographs in this book.

  The second group are those people who helped prepare and who produced the book. Rumen Cholakov found and translated Bulgarian source material for me. My agent, Andrew Kidd, was on hand to guide me through the publishing world. At Penguin, Richard Duguid oversaw the production process. I thank the teams at Penguin and Basic Books, especially Marina Kemp and Leah Stecher. I am also very grateful to my copy-editor, Richard Mason, for being so exacting in his corrections of my text.

  One of the points this book makes is the importance of family, and I know how lucky I am with my family. My mother and father, Susan and Henry, and my brother Tim have always been an immense support, and I am very grateful for their love and encouragement during the writing of this book. They and the others close to us, Aunt Judy, Peter and Jana, bore with patience and humour the long period in which I was ‘finishing’ this book. I owe Lindsey and Caley special thanks for their understanding. I am also grateful to my relatives in Poland. Alfred and Wiesia Czogała followed the book’s progress with enthusiasm and offered a loving home from home in the south. Wojtek and Marysia Burkiewicz and their sons Mateusz, Michał and Marcin all looked after me during my time in Warsaw.

  The last thanks, to my wife and daughter, are most important. My daughter, Maria, arrived in the final months of the writing of this book, and every day of her life brings immense joy and new meaning to mine. To my wife, Ania – I simply could not have written this without you. Thank you for your love, your understanding and your patience, and thank you for keeping a sense of perspective when I was losing mine.

  Ania, this book is dedicated with all my love to you.

  Introduction

  The World War of 1914–18 was utterly unlike most former wars . . . it was a war for existence, a war of the people in the fullest sense.

  Erich Ludendorff1

  The First World War has long been recognized as the twentieth century’s ‘great seminal catastrophe’.2 Seventy million men were mobilized to fight over the four years and four months that it raged. Nearly ten million people were killed. Communities were destroyed, populations displaced. Hatred, bitterness and grief consumed the belligerents. East-central Europe was the epicentre of this disaster. Germany and Austria-Hungary, the two states spread across the region, were the conflict’s instigators and its losers. Together, they suffered one-third of all the war’s dead.3 No other societies sacrificed more or lost so much. If the 1914–18 conflict was indeed the cause of the evils that would later beset Europe, totalitarian dictatorship, another world war and genocide, this was first of all because it so profoundly changed the societies of central Europe. The key to the tragic course of the continent’s modern history lies in this region, and in the extraordinary exertion, unredeemed sacrifices and physical and moral displacement undergone by its peoples in 1914–18.

  This book is the first modern history to narrate the Great War from the perspectives of the two major Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. It seeks to understand the conflict through their statesmen’s eyes. Above all, however, it is the story of their peoples. Whether civilians standing in the food queues of Vienna and Berlin, soldiers embroiled in the bloody fighting on the Somme or at the Brusilov offensive, or sailors engaged in tense underwater warfare, their fears, desires and ordeals lie at the heart of this account. The peoples were central to this conflict. The First World War’s dynamism and transformative potential derived in large part from its nature as a Volkskrieg – a ‘People’s War’. For conservative statesmen like the German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, perturbed by the demise of the old cabinet wars with limited goals and casualties, what defined this new and frightening struggle, its ‘most miraculous feature’, was ‘the immense power of the people’.4 Popular commitment fuelled the war’s violence and determined its duration. The Central Powers mobilized their populations on a scale unrivalled in Europe. In Germany, 13,387,000 men, an astonishing 86 per cent of the country’s entire male population between eighteen and fifty years old, passed through the armed forces between 1914 and 1918. Austria-Hungary stood only a little behind with eight million soldiers, around 78 per cent of its military-aged manpower.5

  The war experience of the Central Powers was determined by their strategic situation. Germany and Austria-Hungary, together with their allies, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, were trapped during hostilities within a ring of steel. Encircling them was a vastly superior enemy coalition. To the east lay Russia. In the north, west and south were Britain, France, Italy, later the United States, and a host of smaller nations. By war’s end, these enemies controlled 61 per cent of the globe’s territory, 64 per cent of its pre-war gross domestic product, and comprised 70 per cent of its population.6 The Central Powers were isolated from neutral trade. A British naval blockade, tightened ever more ruthlessly as the war continued, closed the ring. Central Europeans imagined themselves as barricaded and besieged within a great fortress. The millions of men called up were needed to keep out the enemy. Yet this siege warfare on a massive scale drew in entire societies. Total mobilization and blockade blurred the distinction between combatant and non-combatant. Not only the young, fit and single, but husbands, fathers, the middle-aged and frequently even the infirm fought this war. At home, women took over their conscripted men’s jobs or migrated into the booming armaments factories. Children were mobilized to help with the harvest and collect valuables for the war effort. These civilians, far from being mere auxiliaries, became targets, and were ravaged by deprivation, malnutrition, sickness and exhaustion. Not just soldiers fighting on the battlefields but a
lso their families struggling to survive at home found that war soon permeated every aspect of their daily lives. To contemporaries, whether in Europe’s major metropolises or its under-modernized rural backwaters, the conflagration appeared terrifyingly all-encompassing, unceasing, expansive. Eight months into hostilities, a Pole living on the Austrian side of the Eastern Front succinctly captured the ubiquity of the horror that had spread across the continent: ‘war on land, in the ground, on water, under water and in the air; war encompassing ever greater circles of Humanity.’7

  Why did the peoples of Austria-Hungary and Germany hold out for so long in the face of terrible hardship and against dreadful odds? Their determination is all the more baffling as few historians today doubt the great culpability borne by their leaders in starting the conflagration or in pursuing aggressive war aims. In part, the peoples had no choice. At the outbreak of war armies in central Europe were granted extraordinary powers over domestic society. States and militaries had effective tools of repression with which they imposed censorship, restrictions on public gatherings and in some places martial law to enforce compliance.8 Yet as an explanation for the long duration of peoples’ readiness to fight, endure and sacrifice, coercion is far from satisfactory. Both Austria-Hungary and Germany were Rechtsstaaten, ‘states of law’, which during the half century before the First World War had guaranteed their subjects’ basic freedoms and fostered educated civil societies.9 While rights were suspended at the outset of hostilities, civil society’s mentalities and institutions persisted, and proved indispensable in underpinning a successful mobilization. In Germany, it was recognized early that a European conflict involving mass conscript armies and requiring the near-total mobilization of industry and agriculture could not be conducted against the will of the people. Austrian leaders who at first attempted to suppress public opinion had found to their cost by the end of 1916 that authoritarianism merely increased resentment and resistance. Both of the major Central Powers granted more, not less, space for public expression in the last two years of hostilities, even as discontent mounted. Persuasion was at a premium, and propaganda, the dark art of guiding opinion, became ever more important. Ideas able to inspire the masses were turned into powerful weapons of war.10