The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost by Cathal Nolan

Author:Cathal Nolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Russian trench on Eastern Front (1917).

Courtesy of Wikimedia Creative Commons.

It was not just Berlin where views hardened. In France and Britain by election, in Russia by tsarist appointment, fiercer governments took power everywhere from 1916 with promises to pursue the war to a hard finish. The Entente powers matched hardening in Berlin with secret treaties to reduce Austria and break apart the Ottoman Empire, even a wild promise to give Constantinople to Russia. Second Rome (Orthodox Byzantium) was to be absorbed by Third Rome (Orthodox Moscow), in fulfilment of an old Muscovite geopolitical and religious ambition. Then tsarist Russia itself fell apart, into civil war and the hands of revolutionaries who turned violently on all Orthodoxy. Views hardened in Washington, too. Into early 1917, Americans still traded with and scolded everyone. While standing militarily on the sidelines, President Woodrow Wilson too self-righteously called for a “peace without victors” in a war trending toward total in ends and means. Once the United States entered the war that April, it would of course fight for a complete military victory. Afterward, Wilson presided over a victor’s peace forced on defeated Germany at the Paris Conference in 1919. That was normal state behavior, once you strip away the self-deluding and high-minded rhetoric: seek to win a war once you are in it, then lock down your victory in the treaty to follow. Even so, none of the Allies contemplated such a diktat as Germany imposed on Russia in March 1918, radicalized war aims far beyond those of 1914 welded into the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Everyone’s war aims had changed with lost blood and treasure, as they always do, expanding to make the promised end justify all the past, present and future sacrifice. No one could stop. In some cases, their own peoples might hang them for having gotten into the war if the politicians and generals tried to get out short of victory. The threat of revolution kept conservative elites in several old empires struggling on well past where reason alone might suggest negotiating an end to fighting. Only the new Austrian Emperor, Karl I, tried to negotiate an exit, and he was blocked and humiliated by Conrad, his own government, and the officer class on which the dynasty relied. Political elites could not stop the runaway peoples’ war they had started under the short-war delusion of 1914. Nor were they wrong to see their class privileges at stake, even their personal survival. Total war meant total victory or total defeat, and once they were in it they knew that. Why not fight on, then, if all was to be lost otherwise? So fight on they did, and lost everything anyway. As a result of defeat, the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman and Romanov dynasties all would be overthrown. The Romanovs would all be killed.

Americans did not arrive in France in large numbers until early 1918. As the doughboys marched briskly down the gangplanks they came without modern artillery and other equipment. The Allies were happy to see them nonetheless, and stepped up to supply what Americans lacked.

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