Europe: A History (184 page)
For the next three years the line hardly moved. Both sides expended men and materials in titanic proportions to straighten out the occasional salient, or to achieve a breakthrough. But every ‘push’ was to no avail. Never had European blood been spilled in such profligate quantities. In the three battles of Ypres, at Vimy Ridge, on the Somme, and, above all, at Verdun the loss of life could on occasion be counted in tens of thousands per hour or hundreds per square yard. Here was a mindless tragedy which no one had foreseen, and which no one knew how to stop. The planned German retreat to prepared defensive positions between Arras and Soissons in February 1917 was a rare act of rationality. Inevitably, the public finger was pointed at the impotent generals. Of the British army, it was said, ‘They were lions led by donkeys.’ [
DOUAUMONT
]
On the Eastern Front, which ran through the heart of Poland, the Central Powers enjoyed much greater success and the hell of unbroken trench warfare was avoided. In August 1914 two Russian army groups crossed the frontier, one entering East Prussia in the north, the other penetrating deep into Galicia in the south. Seeing that the ‘Russian steamroller’ was meant to move slowly, this was a considerable achievement. But then fortunes changed: in the Battle of the Masurian Lakes in September, Hindenberg and Ludendorff totally destroyed Russia’s northern armies, thereby avenging the German failure on the Marne. Russia’s southern group was halted on the outskirts of Cracow. In the winter of 1914–15 indecisive battles were fought both on the German/Russian frontier near Łódź and on the Hungarian border in the Carpathians. But then in May 1915, at Gorlice in Galicia, German troops managed to do what proved impossible in the West: they broke through enemy lines, and fanned out into the plain beyond. In August they occupied Warsaw, and retook Lvov. In the autumn they entered Lithuania, and were poised to cross the mountains into Romania, [
PETROGRAD
]
With the Russian Empire facing invasion along a 1,000-mile front, the Tsar took personal command of his forces in the field. In January 1916, Brusilov’s counter-offensive drove back deep into Galicia, laying an 18-month siege to the fortress of
Przemyśl. But the toll was tremendous; and there it ended. In Romania, the Germans took Bucharest in December. In 1917 the main German and Austrian advance restarted, moving steadily into the Baltic provinces, Byelorussia, and
Ukraine. With internal revolution compounding Russia’s military failure, it was a matter of fine judgement whether the Central Powers could destroy the Empire of the Tsars before it collapsed of its own accord. It is often said that the Russian army suffered excessive casualties; in reality the Russians lost a lower percentage of their population than other combatants. The key statistics refer to prisoners of war. For every 100 tsarist soldiers who fell in battle, 300 surrendered. The comparable figure for the British army was 20, for the French 24, for the Germans 26. The soldiers of the Tsar had little will to fight.
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LANGEMARCK
L
ANGEMARCK
is a small village five miles to the north of Ypres in Belgium. Like all the villages in that district, it possesses a war cemetery filled with the dead from successive Anglo-German battles over the Ypres salient in 1914–17. In outward appearance it is indistinguishable from scores of others. Indeed, the long-overgrown grave of 25,000 unidentified German soldiers bears no comparison to the imposing monument at the nearby Menin Gate, where the names of 40,000 unidentified British casualties are inscribed. Yet, in the opinion of a leading military historian, ‘It is, in a real sense, the birthplace of the Second World War.’
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For, unbeknown to many modern visitors, Langemarck shelters the last resting-place of the comrades of a young Austrian volunteer whom Providence spared for still greater deeds.
Hitler, an unsuccessful art student and draft-dodger from the Austrian army, had listened with rapture in a Munich crowd to the declaration of war on 1 August 1914, and had immediately signed up for service in the German Army. He was assigned to the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry (List) Regiment, and arrived on the Western Front in October, just in time for the first Battle of Ypres. In this way he became a witness to the terrible
Kindermord
, the ‘Massacre of Innocents’, where tens of thousands of half-trained German recruits, mainly eager university students, were cut to pieces by the steady firepower of professional British soldiers. It was the first great slaughter of Germans, amply revenged, no doubt, at Passchendaele and on the Somme. Hitler never forgot it.
Hitler’s ‘supreme experience’ in the trenches, where for four years he lived the charmed life of a courageous
Meldegänger
or ‘regimental runner’, undoubtedly fired the pathological drive of his subsequent career. Tormented by the fate of his dead and mutilated comrades, and by a huge German sacrifice that led only to defeat, he set out to avenge their deaths; to humiliate Germany’s conquerors in their turn; and to make Germans feel once again proud, superior, hateful, ruthless. His vow of vengeance struck a common chord in millions of wounded German hearts.
Langemarck, therefore, symbolizes the essential psychological link between the First World War and the Second, between the slaughter of Ypres and Verdun, and that of the London Blitz, Warsaw, and Stalingrad.
DOUAUMONT
O
N
25 February 1916, on the fourth day of the German offensive against Verdun, the troops of the Crown Prince seized the stone and concrete fortress of Douaumont. The fort lay 6 km from their starting-point on the circumference of the salient, and half-way to the centre of the city. For the next eighteen months it would be the focal point of a battle which in duration and intensity has no equal. Flanked to the west by the Fort de Vaux, it commanded the right bank of the Meuse and looked across to the hills of the left bank, especially to Côte 304 and to Le Mort-Homme. For the German attackers, it formed the pivot of a giant pincer operation fed by fourteen railway lines along a 130-mile arc. For the French defenders, it formed the terminus of the
voie sacrée
, the narrow corridor which brought reinforcements through the evacuated city from Bar-le-Duc. Shelled night and day, mined from below, and constantly rocked by explosions, its ruins and tunnels were the scene of hand-to-hand combat and of whole companies buried alive. The moonscape was steadily churned into a cold stew of mud, masonry, and human remains. It was regained by the French on 24 October, contested by the Germans until August 1917, but not definitively relieved until the American offensive of St Michel in September 1918. Pétain’s words proved true. ‘Courage,’ he had promised; ‘On les aura.’
Verdun claimed some 800,000 lives—forty times the population of the city. It is for the French memory what the Somme and Ypres were for the British and Caporetto for the Italians, or what Stalingrad would be for the Russians. For the Germans, it implied what all their military failures would do—titanic, futile sacrifices.
On the seventieth anniversary of the battle in 1986, the French President and the German Chancellor participated at Verdun in a ceremony of reconciliation. Their hands were linked in a gesture which few other leaders of Europe’s warring nations have been able to achieve.
By then, much of the devastated landscape had been reclaimed by vegetation. But the vast ossuary at Douaumont, with its tower of four crosses, guards the remains of 130,000 unidentified soldiers of both armies who rest in the common granite tombs. A memorial centre, equipped with exhibits, guidebooks, and video shows, attempts to communicate what a veteran once called the ‘incommunicable’. On the site of the disappeared village of Fleury-devant-Douaumont, a Madonna adorns the façade of a memorial chapel. She is Notre Dame de I’Europe.
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PETROGRAD
I
N
1914 the name of Russia’s capital, Sankt Petersburg, was changed to I the more patriotic-sounding Petrograd. As with the British royal family of Hanover-Saxe-Coburg, which was changed to Windsor, a name of German origin was thought inappropriate during the war against Germany. But Petrograd was to last for only one decade before it gave way in its turn to Leningrad, [
GOTHA
]
St Petersburg had grown into one of Europe’s most magnificent cities. In addition to the classical palaces and government buildings, the banks of the Neva housed a major port and commercial centre, a brilliant cultural community, an expanding industrial district, and a huge garrison. The spirit of the community of two million citizens was captured in the statue of the Bronze Horseman presented to the city by Catherine the Great in honour of her predecessor, Peter.
At the time of the first name-change, the city’s future dedicatee was exiled in Switzerland with no hope of an early return. He was no pacifist; and his statement on
The Tasks of Revolutionary Social Democracy
, where he called for an ‘international civil war’ to exploit the conflict, envisaged the defeat of Tsardom. All his leading supporters in Russia were arrested on suspicion of treason. At their trial they were defended by a liberal lawyer, Alexander Kerensky, who must later have rued his choice of clients.
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Under Soviet rule, Petrograd/Leningrad was to be subjected to the most extreme of experiences. Spurned by the Bolsheviks, who had moved the capital to Moscow, it was repeatedly seen by Stalin as the conspiratorial nest of a non-existent opposition; it lost a significant part of its population first in the Revolution and again in the Purges. In 1941–4, it endured a 1,000-day siege on the edge of the German-Soviet frontline, and in conditions of indescribable cold, hunger, and starvation lost up to a million inhabitants.
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Although state officials and the military secured the means to fight on for three years, the Soviet authorities either could not or would not evacuate or supply the civilian population. The result was a daily mix of Coventry and the Warsaw Ghetto. Descriptions of carousing in the Party House, alongside corpses in the streets and scientific workers dead at their laboratory benches, only add to the tally of inhumanity.
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After each ordeal Leningrad was replenished by a fresh influx of immigrants. The ‘Hero City’ became a symbol of the human capacity for regeneration. Yet in 1991, on the eve of the Soviet collapse, the question of its name arose for the third time. To the horror of Communist veterans, the citizens’ referendum decided neither for Leningrad nor for Petrograd but for Sankt Petersburg.
Meanwhile, in the Balkan theatre, superior Austrian forces steadily gained the upper hand. They occupied Belgrade (October 1915), Montenegro, and Albania (1916). A heroic Serbian retreat across the mountains to the Dalmatian coast provided the stuff of legend. In 1915 the Serbs were corralled into Macedonia, where Bulgaria joined the Austrian attack. But the Macedonian Front held, partly through French support via Thessalonika. Merciless Western pressure on Greece forced the collapse of the government, and ended Greek neutrality. [
FLORA
]
In the Mediterranean, the Western Powers enjoyed naval supremacy, and several attempts were made to compensate for the stalemate in France. On 25 April 1915 a British force landed at Gallipoli on the Dardanelles. The aim was to seize Constantinople, to establish direct contact with Russia, and, in the words of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to attack ‘the soft underbelly’ of the Central Powers. The plan was brilliantly conceived, but ended in tragedy. The movements of the expeditionary force, which contained the heroic Anzac Division from Australia and New Zealand, had been betrayed in advance. The Turks were waiting on the cliff-tops, commanded by an energetic young officer called Kemal Pasha. After that, the Western Powers confined their activities to the Ottoman periphery. A young English visionary, T. E. Lawrence, single-handedly led the tribes of the Arabian peninsula into revolt. The French established themselves in Lebanon. In 1916 General Allenby advanced into Palestine from the British base in Egypt, riding into Jerusalem on Christmas Day. The British also entered Mesopotamia. They captured Baghdad after a humiliating reverse in March 1917, and pressed on into Persia. Both Arabs and Zionist Jews took heart from the British victories. On 2 November 1917 the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, was persuaded to issue a declaration accepting the principle of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. In the Caucasus, Russians and Ottomans struggled back and forth over the mountainous Armenian border region. The fighting provided the backdrop to the Ottoman Government’s reprisals against its Armenian subjects, [
GENOCIDE
]
In Italy, battle was joined with the Austrians in difficult alpine terrain on the edge of the lands which the Italians were claiming as their own. In eleven colossal battles on the River Isonzo, the fighting was no less sacrificial than in the West. Half a million men died at Caporetto (September-December 1917). Italy’s casualties were on the same scale as Britain’s. Her magnificent recovery from the brink of disaster greatly weakened the Central powers. The Austrian army was broken
in Italy. The Italian sacrifice, largely discounted by her allies, left a deep sense of wounded pride.
FLORA
L
ATE
in August 1914, the 35-year-old daughter of a Suffolk clergyman, Flora Sandes, arrived with seven companions in the Serbian town of Kragujevac. Some fifty miles from Belgrade, Kragujevac was the main base for Serbian forces fighting for their capital city against the Austro-Hungarian offensive. Flora’s group preceded several British, French, Russian, and American medical teams appointed by the Serbian Relief Fund. In mid-April 1915 they were joined by Mrs Mabel St Clair Stobart, a formidable dame who had raised a Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps during the recent Balkan wars. She now came up from Salonica, in command of a 70-strong field hospital staffed entirely by women, except for her husband, John Greenhaigh, their treasurer. She collected her casualties with a special ‘flying column’, which she led on horseback. Over 600 British female volunteers were active in Serbia.
Of all the women’s wartime organizations, the British women’s medical services were undoubtedly among the most professional. Known as the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), after their founder, an Edinburgh surgeon called Elsie Inglis, they set out to prove that women could cope with the most stressful and responsible of enterprises. In due course they sent fourteen fully equipped hospitals to all the Allied fronts except those controlled by the British army. Mrs St Clair Stobart had worked in Cherbourg and in Antwerp before sailing for Serbia. Dr Inglis died in November 1917 after a year in Russia.
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Female surgeons were still a novelty in those years, especially in military hospitals. A French journalist, who once asked to watch Dr Inglis at work, emerged looking green and yelling: ‘C’est vrai, elle coupe’ (It’s true, she’s cutting!)
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In October 1915, when the Austrians and Bulgarians broke through, the Serbian army could escape only by a winter trek over the mountains to the Albanian coast. That terrible march through mud, snow, hunger, frostbite, typhus, and gangrene cost 40,000 lives. The Stobart Unit marched with them.
Of all the volunteers, Flora Sandes (1879–1961) went furthest in her career of gender inversion. She joined the Serbian infantry, survived the trek to Albania, fought in combat, was severely wounded, and was decorated for bravery. She ended the war with an officer’s commission. She later married a Russian
émigré
, settled in Belgrade, defied the Gestapo, and only returned to England in widowhood.
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She was following a well-worn East European tradition, observable from Russia and Poland to Albania, where women in hard times stand in for their decimated menfolk.
One source for the British women’s determination lay in the attitudes of their own government. When Elsie Inglis offered the services of the SWH to the War Office in August 1914, she was told: ‘My good lady, go home and sit still.’
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