The Battlefronts

The first months of the war crushed any hope of a quick victory. The Germans were guided by the Schlieffen Plan, named after a former chief of the general staff. The plan outlined a way to combat enemies on two fronts by concentrating on one foe at a time. It called for a concentrated blow to the west against France, which would lead to that nation’s defeat in six weeks, accompanied by a light holding action against Russia to the east. The attack on France was to proceed without resistance through neutral Belgium. Once France had fallen, Germany’s western armies would move against Russia, which, it was believed, would mobilize far more slowly. None of the great powers expected that war would turn into the prolonged massacre of their nations’ youth.

When German troops reached Belgium and Luxembourg at the beginning of August 1914, the Belgians surprisingly mounted a vigorous defense, which slowed the German advance. In September, the British and French armies engaged the Germans along the Marne River in France. Neither side could defeat the other, and in the first three months of war, more than 1.5 million men fell on the western front alone. Guns like the 75-millimeter howitzer, accurate at long range, turned what was supposed to be an offensive war of movement into a stationary standoff along a line that stretched from the North Sea through Belgium and northern France to Switzerland.

On the eastern front, the Russians drove far more quickly than expected into East Prussia in mid-August. The Russians believed that no army could stand up to the massive number of their soldiers, regardless of how badly equipped and poorly trained those soldiers were. Their success was short-lived. The Germans overwhelmed the tsar’s army in East Prussia. Victory made heroes of the German military leaders Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934) and Erich Ludendorff (1865–1937), who demanded more troops for the eastern front, undermining the Schlieffen Plan by removing forces from the west before the western front had been won.

War at sea proved equally indecisive. The Allies blockaded ports to prevent supplies from reaching Germany and Austria-Hungary. Kaiser William and his advisers planned a massive U-boat (Unterseeboot, “underwater boat,” or submarine) campaign against Allied and neutral shipping. In May 1915, U-boats sank the British passenger ship Lusitania and killed 1,198 people, including 124 Americans. Despite U.S. outrage, President Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) maintained a policy of neutrality; Germany, unwilling to provoke Wilson further, called off unrestricted submarine warfare. In May 1916, the navies of Germany and Britain finally clashed in the North Sea at Jutland. This inconclusive battle demonstrated that the German fleet could not master British seapower.

Ideas of a negotiated peace were discarded: “No peace before England is defeated and destroyed,” William II stormed against his cousin King George V. French leaders called for a “war to the death.” General staffs on both sides continued to prepare fierce attacks several times a year. Campaigns opened with heavy artillery pounding enemy trenches and gun emplacements. Troops then responded to the order to go “over the top” by scrambling out of their trenches and into battle, usually to be mowed down by machine-gun fire from defenders secure in their own trenches. On the western front, the French assaulted the Germans throughout 1915 but accomplished little. On the eastern front, Russian armies captured parts of Galicia in the spring of 1915 and lumbered toward Hungary.

The next year’s battles were even more disastrous and futile. To cripple French morale, the Germans launched massive assaults on the fortress at Verdun, firing as many as a million shells in a single day. Combined French and German losses totaled close to a million men. Nonetheless, the French held. The British unleashed an artillery pounding of German trenches in the Somme region in June 1916; 1.25 million men were killed or wounded, but the final result was stalemate. By the end of 1916, the French had suffered more than 3.5 million casualties. To help the Allies engaged at Verdun and the Somme, the Russians struck again, driving into the Carpathian Mountains, recouping territory, and menacing Austria-Hungary. The German army stopped the advance, as the German general staff decided it would take over Austrian military operations.

Had military leaders thoroughly dominated the scene, historians judge, all armies would have been utterly demolished by the end of 1915. Yet ordinary soldiers in this war were not automatons in the face of what seemed to them suicidal orders from their commanders. Informal agreements to avoid battles against each other allowed some battalions to go for long stretches with hardly a casualty. Enemies facing each other across the trenches frequently ate their meals in peace, even though the trenches were within hand-grenade reach. Throughout the war, soldiers on both fronts played an occasional game of soccer or made gestures of agreement not to fight. A British veteran of the trenches explained to a new recruit that the Germans “don’t want to fight any more than we do, so there’s a kind of understanding between us. Don’t fire at us and we’ll not fire at you.” Many ordinary soldiers came to feel more warmly toward enemies who shared the trench experience than toward civilians back home. This camaraderie relieved some of the misery of trench life and aided survival. In some cases, upper-class officers and working-class recruits became friends in that “wholly masculine way of life uncomplicated by women,” as another soldier put it. Soldiers tended one another’s blistered feet and came to love one another, sometimes even passionately. This sense of frontline community survived the war and influenced postwar politics.

Troops of colonized soldiers from Asia and Africa often were put in the very front ranks, where the risks were greatest. Yet, like class divisions, racial barriers sometimes fell: a European might give extra blankets and clothing to soldiers from warmer regions. These troops saw their “masters” completely undone and “uncivilized,” for when fighting did break out, trenches became a veritable hell of shelling and sniping, flying body parts, blinding gas, and rotting cadavers. Some soldiers became hysterical or shell-shocked through the stress and violence of battle. Those who had gone to war to escape ordinary life in industrial society learned, as one German put it, “that in the modern war . . . the triumph of the machine over the individual is carried to its most extreme form.”