Towards Total War

From its very beginnings, the First World War was perceived as different from previous conflicts. In the spring of 1915, French soldiers used the expression ‘Grande Guerre' for the first time in their correspondence; it reveals how the conflict pushed violence to its paroxysm and human endur­ance to its limits.

The war of movement that lasted four months on the Western Front (August to November 1914) and almost a year on the Eastern Front was particularly deadly: 300,000 French soldiers were killed in 1914, which is to say an average of 60,000 dead each month and more than 2,000 each day. On the single day of 22 August 1914, the French army lost 27,000 combatants - as many soldiers as were killed during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962.^[457] As for the German army, September 1914 was one of the three deadliest months of the war: 71,481 were killed or declared missing, only a few less than in July and September 1916. On the Western Front, the Battle of the Frontiers, at the

end of August 1914, marked a turning point which was underestimated by military historians for a long time.

The rather imprecise monthly tallies of casualties do not allow us to appreciate fully the descent into violence as it was experienced by comba­tants. In their war journals, soldiers narrate a series of initiations, which progressively led them to discover the reality of war violence: destroyed houses; cannonades heard for the first time; the first wounded; the first dead bodies (of men or of horses); the first experience of combat. Though Europe quickly descended into modern warfare, the initiation of individuals to violence happened step by step - with the decisive threshold of the ‘baptism of fire'.

From the start, civilians were also targeted, in Belgium, in northern France, on the Eastern Front and in the Balkans. There were massacres, deportations and sexual violence; houses, hospitals and historical monu­ments were destroyed and cemeteries were desecrated. Only four days after the invasion of Belgium, 850 Belgian men, women and children had already been executed: Germans carried out a ruthless suppression of pur­ported ‘francs-tireurs' (civilian guerrilla fighters) and of their accomplices. More than 6,000 civilians were killed in Belgium and northern France in August and September 1914, in massacres that foreshadowed those of the Second World War. Women and children were sometimes separated from men, as in the Tschoffen Wall Massacre in Dinant; at others they were lined up together, without any age distinctions, as at Faubourg des Rivages on 23 August 1914.^[459]

Degradations, pillaging and destruction usually accompanied these mas­sacres. In Chateau-Thierry or Coulommiers, for example, the ‘Germans took everything they wanted, even loading quantities of provisions and bedding onto wagons... Inside the houses, they smashed whatever they did not take.'^[460] The conquerors left an indelible imprint as they lashed out at people's homes; anthropologists characterise such actions as crimes of desecration.

After the massacres of the summer and fall of 1914,1915 saw the escalation of violence on the battlefields as the armies settled into a war of positions, at least on the Western Front.^[462] The General Staff sought at all costs to maintain an offensive posture and to keep the hope of a decisive breakthrough alive, even at the expense of heavy casualties - for example, in the attacks described as grignotage (literally, ‘nibbling') launched by the French commander-in-chief Joffre. A new kind of combatant came into being, sprawled beneath enemy fire, making himself as invisible as possible in his dirty, muddy uniform. In order to survive, the soldier needed to become one with the earth. In 1915, the French army experienced more casualties than in 1916, the year of the great offensive battles of Verdun and of the Somme. In the inferno of Gallipoli, the Australian and Turkish nations were born. For ANZAC troops, the battle was a sanitary disaster almost unequalled during the rest of the war (the exception being the French offensive at the Chemin des Dames in April 1917): with 20,000 wounded and 64,000 suffering from epidemics, the Australian Army Medical Corps was completely overwhelmed.^{[463] [464]}

Civilians were far from spared in 1915, a pivotal year which saw Europe descend into total war. On the Western Front, the atrocities of the invasion period opened onto new kinds of violence against civilians, as Germany began its occupation of Belgium and northern France: forced labour; pilla­ging of natural resources; famine; deportations to German labour camps.

On the Eastern Front, the war of movement created almost 4 million refugees who fled the advance of German troops.^[465] Starting in May 1915, the Russian authorities' scorched-earth policy also forced the displacement of some 134,000 German and Austro-Hungarian nationals, as well as of a million Jews who lived in the Russian Empire and were suspected of being internal enemies. These massive population shifts, which accompanied the ‘great retreat' of the Russian army in the spring of 1915, entailed heavy casualties from exhaustion, hunger and epidemics. The deportation policy was then relaxed beginning in the autumn of 1915.

Conversely, for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the violence against civilians became more brutal and more systematic in January (in response to Russian victories in the Caucasus), in April (when the Allies landed on the Gallipoli peninsula), and finally in June. It was not only the intensity but the very nature of the violence of war that changed in 1915. By the end of the year, the majority of the Armenians in the empire would have been killed, in the first genocide of the twentieth century. The willingness to destroy an ethnic group or a people by physically annihilating it, to draw on the lawyer Raphael Lemkin's definition, as well as that of the 1948 UN Convention, was not new. But never before in Western history had a genocidal policy been carried out so systematically, leading to the death of 650,000 to 850,000 civilians - which is to say about 8 per cent of the victims of the Great War.^[466]

The year 1915 also saw the introduction of new weapons which trans­formed combat practices and dramatically increased violence on the battle­fields.

The increased sophistication of weapons of war is one of the markers of the development of industrial warfare - a ‘war of iron and gas', as the novelist Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle put it. We see this development represented in paintings of the conflict: in 1915, C. R. W. Nevinson painted his famous work Machine Gun, in which he showed how, in the industrial age, combatants became fused with their weapons. Ten years later, Marcel Gromaire would take up this theme again in his painting La Guerre (1925): five soldiers wait, impassibly, in their trench. The French painter represented them as robot­like, bundled up in their horizon-blue uniforms, to remind viewers that the Great War was foremost a mechanical, industrial and dehumanising war.

Indeed, the dominant image of 1915 was that of a war of machines that destroyed individuals. Combatants were killed by gas; civilians became victims of the submarine war with the sinking of the Lusitania, which was torpedoed on 7 May 1915.

Industrial warfare reached its apogee in the following year, 1916, with the titanic confrontations of Verdun and of the Somme. The combatants' experi­ence of war was utterly transformed. For the first time in the history of warfare, firepower did not merely mean inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy; it meant that combatants who were hit by a shell could simply vanish. Without bodily remains, no burial was possible. The desperate quest for the missing would mark the rest of the war and the postwar period. New rituals would have to be invented to pay tribute to the combatants of whom no trace remained: lists of names engraved on monuments to the dead, such as at Thiepval in the Somme, and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier - the Great War's quintessential commemorative innovation.^{[469] [470]}

Paul Dubrulle, a Jesuit serving at Verdun in 1916 as an NCO in the 8th Infantry Regiment, described the distinctive fear triggered by artillery bombardment:

When one heard the whistle in the distance, one's whole body contracted to resist the too excessively potent vibrations of the explosion, and at each repetition it was a new attack, a new fatigue, a new suffering. Under this regime, the most solid nerves cannot resist for long... Perhaps the best comparison is that of seasickness... [sic] finally one abandons one's self to it, one has no longer even the strength to cover oneself with one's pack as protection against splinters, and one scarcely still has left the strength to pray to God... [sic] To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is a fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the bombardment.1⁷

In the midst of battle, physical violence (sensory saturation, deafening, exhaustion) fused with moral suffering (the individual's powerlessness in the face of the chaos of war, terror, dehumanisation). Combatants were trapped in a world without clear boundaries, whose spatial and temporal landmarks had been removed. After the clashes of the beginning of the war, such as the Battle of the Marne and the Battle of Tannenberg, there would be no more battles lasting only a few days. The Battle of Galllipoli took more than eight months, and that of Verdun, ten months. The Battle of the Somme took more than four months, as did the third Battle of Ypres in 1917. The very definition of a battle had changed: it now meant a siege in the open country­side. Considerably enlarged and fragmented, the battlefield now spread over dozens of square kilometres. A new kind of battle was born, whose violence stemmed not only from the kinds of weapons being used, but also from the feeling of powerlessness experienced by soldiers.

In the trenches of the Western Front, mud was everywhere, swallowing up corpses and threatening to drown the living. The violence of war, as it was perceived by combatants, was inseparable from this constant attack on their individuality: there was no more space or time to oneself. In this context, time ‘stolen away' from the war - in correspondence with one's loved ones or the crafting of trench art - became vital. There was also a violence in waiting and boredom, which took up most of wartime. And when combat finally broke out, soldiers felt like simple victims sacrificed to chance.

This anonymous, depersonalised violence had a double effect on comba­tants. First, it gave them the feeling that their survival was due only to luck. The syndrome of ‘survivor's guilt' would be studied in the years that followed by the psychiatrist William Niederland. ‘Still now, almost sixty years later, I hold on to this conviction: I'm here by chance', confided the historian Georges Dumezil in an interview given just before his death in 1986. ‘I came out different, on borrowed time.'

Industrial warfare also removed the interpersonal dimension from the act of killing. With the exception of a few snipers, soldiers on the battlefield in 1914-18 rarely aimed at precise targets. Face-to-face killing was uncommon: only when an enemy trench fell into the hands of a group of assailants did hand-to-hand fighting take place. These moments did not demonstrate the technological sophistication that characterised the rest of the war. Combatants used all kinds of primitive weapons: shovel handles, knives and clubs, sometimes crafted by the soldiers themselves. The grenade remained the weapon used most often during these encounters. That said, such moments of interpersonal violence were uncommon. Data on the origins of deadly wounds confirms that artillery dominated the war of 1914-18. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, 70 per cent of French soldiers and 90 per cent of German soldiers had been killed by bullets. Forty years later, only 20-30 per cent of overall deaths were caused by bullet wounds; 70 per cent of the dead were killed by artillery shells.

In 1914-18, soldiers rarely made eye contact with those they killed. Death no longer had a face; rather, it took on the sinister and grotesque appearance of the bodies abandoned in no man's land. Skills long taught in military training, such as bayonet attacks, were of no use in the context of the war's new violence. At the same time, industrial warfare gave rise to a new kind of narrative about violence, one specific to the era of total war and of genocide. Its central theme can be summed up as each individual's struggle to maintain his or her identity in an increasingly dehumanising conflict. Soldiers felt entirely overwhelmed by the violence of war, as if they counted for nothing.