The triple stalemate

In the summer of 1914, the call to arms was greeted with widespread (though not universal) enthusiasm and relief. The international Left and pacifists were sidelined. Despite decades of hostility from the ruling elites, opposition parties united behind the national war efforts in a show of patriotic solidarity.

Indeed, the First World War left deep scars in European life precisely because it became a full-scale four-year struggle between armies, economies and societies. Without it, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Second World War are unimagin­able. This is why, having examined how war came, we also need to consider briefly why it lasted so long. The answers are connected. Each step towards 1914 and each step afterwards was an ‘incremental' and ‘sequential' one. As always, the interplay between what leaders chose to do and the circumstances in which they confronted each choice is key to understanding why a return to the pre-war status quo was impossible. Over time, options narrowed. Every new offensive plan or diplomatic initiative held out the promise of success. Not only did it become easier to lose 50,000 soldiers after losing the first 50,000, but the victory required to justify such sacrifice had to be all the more complete. Until 1917 a triple stalemate reigned: diplomatically, a compromise peace did not emerge; militarily, decisive break­through was unrealizable; and, on the home fronts, national solidarity held firm.

The incompatibility of war aims highlights why compromise proved to be impossible.

The drive towards annexations and war aims premised on stripping foes of their independence and security also helps to explain why, as we shall see in Chapter 2, no compromise peace emerged until December 1917, when the Bolsheviks signed an armistice. In the eight months before, Austria-Hungary and Russia, the faltering members of each coalition, explored the prospects for a compromise, but both initiatives fell flat for the same reasons: territorial issues and alliance cohesion. Britain and France could not break the secret pledge to Italy to support its territorial ambitions against Austria without jeopardizing not only Italian support, but also that of Serbia, Romania and possibly Russia. Vienna would not break with Berlin, nor did it have the power to moderate German war aims. After the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in March 1917, moreover, both the provisional government and the revolutionary Petrograd Soviet, the two rival centres of political authority that succeeded the tsar, sent out peace feelers, but to find a general peace, not a separate one. Russia continued to adhere to the September 1914 Pact of London that committed the Entente Powers to refrain from separate peace talks. At the same time, Russia did not have the strength or single-mindedness to reshape Allied war aims to permit a compromise. Finally, unofficial contacts between France, Britain and Germany initiated by the Vatican peace note of August 1917 also came to nothing because both sides regarded their core war aims — Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium — as too important to abandon. Moreover, neither Britain nor France was willing to cut a deal with the Germans at the other's expense.

Bolsheviks

Originally in 1903 a faction led by Lenin within the Russian Social Democratic Party, over time the Bolsheviks became a separate party and led the October 1917 revolution in Russia. After this ‘Bolsheviks' was used as a shorthand to refer to the Soviet government and communists in general.

U-boat (English abbreviation

of Unterseeboot)

A German submarine.

The diplomatic deadlock would not have mattered had one coalition managed to convert its strength into a decisive military victory, but the preponderance of defensive fire made such a breakthrough impossible. Tanks, motor transport and close-support aircraft, married with ‘infiltration tactics', would restore mobility on the battlefield by 1939, but once the armies of 1914 marched away from the railheads, they became bogged down in trench warfare owing to the superiority of the defence. With offensive ideas running dry, the goal simply became, as General Ludendorff put it, to last ‘ten minutes longer' than the enemy. The war thus resembled a titanic siege between mass armies, societies and economies. Which Great Power would give in or collapse first? Both sides hoped to manipulate neutrals and to recruit allies to tip the scales. Turkey and Bulgaria (October 1915) joined the Central Powers. The Entente assembled a global coalition of twenty-two states, including Japan and America. Britain and France struck at the Ottomans at Gallipoli and in the Middle East. The war expanded into Africa and Asia as well. The Entente blockaded the Central Powers, and the Germans launched a counter­blockade with U-boats. However, victory was to be found only in Europe, where the preponderance of men and fire counted. At the outbreak of war, the total French stockpile of artillery shells was five million. Two years later they were lobbing this many shells at the Germans per month. By 1918, the figure had reached ten million per month. Supplying these storms of steel and manning the trenches required an unprecedented level of state intervention in economic and social life. Large ministries responsible for the efficient management of munitions, fuel, labour, transport and food became crucial for survival. Twentieth-century total war had arrived.

If not militarily or diplomatically, the only other way in which the war could have come to an early end was by the domestic collapse of one of the Great Powers.