Refighting the Great War

The outbreak of the First World War is a topic that belies the maxim that the farther one stands from a historical event the more dispassionately one can examine it. With regard to World War I, the opposite has more often been the case. In the 1920s and even for a time after what the English then called the “Second German War,” most mainstream scholars assumed that the major belligerents in the disaster of 1914 shared responsibility for it. William Langer, Sidney Fay, Oran Hale, Gerhard Ritter, Raymond Aron, and even those whose diplomatic studies tilted sharply toward the Allied cause, such as Luigi Albertini and Bernadotte Schmidt, treated the war’s outbreak as the result of indiscretions committed on both sides. The judgment embodied in the Treaty of Versailles—that Germany should accept exclusive responsibility for the war—seemed in retrospect to be a dangerous exaggeration used to justify a punitive peace. In the 1960s, however, there appeared the revisionist work of Fritz Fischer and his more embattled follower Immanuel Geiss; this reinterpretation received a noticeably sympathetic hearing among historians in the United States and England.

According to these authors, the German imperial government started the war with full knowledge that it would become a general one but viewed the struggle as necessary to achieve world power. This German bid for hegemony, the argument goes, enjoyed support at all levels of German society, including the nationalistically intoxicated working class, and it involved the political absorption of territories taken from neighboring states and German economic control of east Central and Eastern Europe, even beyond the new imperial borders.

Fischerites, who included my own dissertation adviser, Hajo Holborn at Yale, stressed the continuities of aggressive German nationalism in the two world wars. They considered the Nazi-led quest for Lebensraum to be more or less a replay of what Kaiser Wilhelm II’s army had intended to achieve, and they made much of the perceived stylistic and antidemocratic similarities between imperial and Nazi Germany. The German chancellor in 1914, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, long viewed as a reluctant participant in the conflict and as someone who feared its catastrophic consequences for his country, became for the Fischerites a sinister warmonger. On the basis of a long memorandum of September 1914, Fischer argued that Bethmann greeted the war as an opportunity to expand the Reich by incorporating French and Belgian territories and by setting up a German economic consortium in the east. In Fischer’s view, this expansionist plan was so widely accepted among Germans that the chancellor chose to promote it as soon as the war was launched. The supposedly premeditated plan surfaced one month after the German invasion of Belgium, in the form of the chancellor’s military aims. Fischer claimed that violation of Belgian neutrality, on August 2, which England cited as its reason for entering the war against Germany, not only took place because of the timetable that had been devised for a two-front war, but was carried out above all because of German territorial ambitions.

Most of those championing the Fischer thesis were Teutonophobes rather than Marxists. Yale classicist Donald Kagan devoted his writing energy in the 1980s and 1990s to defending the Fischer thesis. In his book On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (1996), Kagan draws extended comparisons between imperial and Nazi Germany and presents the two regimes as almost equally dangerous enemies of Anglo-American democracy. In National Review (April 2, 2001), Jacob Heilbrunn prefaced an attack on Nazi-apologist David Irving by pointing to other cranky historians attached to English universities, singling out Niall Ferguson of Oxford University as someone kooky enough to suggest that England might have done well to stay out of the First World War, referring to Ferguson’s 1999 book, The Pity of War. And in The Abolition of Britain (2001), the usually sober Tory author Peter Hitchens goes off the deep end by flailing those who excuse “the German aggression of 1914.”

What Ferguson does, to his credit, is put aside the burden of World War II–induced recriminations in order to understand the outbreak and stakes of World War I. In his introduction to The Pity of War, he discusses his personal reasons for being interested in that struggle, as one in which his grandfather fought and that upon reflection seems to have been avoidable for both Continental Europe and his own country. Although part of his sprawling study interspersed with charts and statistics is “counterfactual history,” dealing with what might have happened if England had not joined the anti-German side in 1914, the bulk of the book covers questions that should have been settled fifty years ago. Ferguson demonstrates—one might hope for the last time—that the war erupted because of shared irresponsibility among the belligerents, illustrated by spiraling arms races, missed diplomatic opportunities, and the encircling alliance against Germany, to which the Germans responded by devising reckless plans for a first strike against France. Ferguson maintains that Germany was less responsible than previously thought, and England, especially the Liberal government of Edward Grey that took over in 1905, more blameworthy than has been conventionally assumed.

If the Germans were supposedly militarists in the early twentieth century, Ferguson argues, neither the percentage of their gross domestic product (GDP) earmarked for military uses nor the proportion of young German men conscripted into the army indicates this fact. Until 1913, in fact, the German army lagged greatly in numbers behind the French and Russian forces, although Germany contained at least one-third more people than France. Among the major powers, only England spent a lower percentage on its military budget than did imperial Germany. The German Kriegsministerium, as Gerhard Ritter showed in the 1960s, had no desire to build a large army that would have to incorporate liberal bourgeois elements. The war ministry also feared that any major struggle involving Germany might precipitate social unrest. Another, more surprising factor hindered the expansion of the German military: raising revenues for military purposes was harder in Germany because of its federalized political system than it was under the more centralized governments of England and France.

Hence, Fischer’s picture of a highly centralized and despotic German state waiting to burst into belligerence is certainly exaggerated. At the very least it is offset by the remarkable restraint exhibited by the Germans during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913—Germany stayed out of both conflicts and counseled Austria to do the same.

Ferguson discerns among prewar English political leaders both a deep dislike for the Germans, as upstart competitors, and a growing fatalism about having to go to war against them. Edward Grey, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Sea John Fisher, Director of Military Operations Henry Wilson, and King Edward VII all expressed, well before 1914, unfriendly intentions toward imperial Germany and stressed the need for war preparations. The military planning engaged in by France and England between 1905 and 1909 considered a preemptive strike against Germany through Belgium, and the shock expressed by Grey in August 1914 about the German violation of Belgian neutrality, agreed on by the European powers in 1831, was therefore at least partly feigned. The German occupation of Belgium may merely have forestalled a possible Anglo-French amphibious landing in Flanders.

Ferguson argues that German concerns about military encirclement were justified, and that the communication, sent by Foreign Secretary Richard Haldane in 1912, that “Britain will not allow Germany to become the leading power on the continent,” aroused in Berlin understandable concern about British ill will. Ferguson also notes that during Haldane’s mission to Berlin in 1912 to ease Anglo-German tensions, Grey stated that England was committed to supporting France no matter how a European war might break out.

In one arresting part of his book, Ferguson provides a devastating critique of the Fischer thesis, noting that in July 1914 Bethmann called for a “victory without conquest” if Germany should be pulled into a general war. (So much for the argument that the September memorandum consisted of positions long embraced by the chancellor.) Ferguson shows that Germany’s war aims were no more destructive of the status quo than those proposed during the conflict by the French and British. He insists that “the German decision to risk a European war in 1914 was not based on hubris: there was no bid for world power. Rather, Germany’s leaders acted out of a sense of weakness.” Although the British navy and the English expeditionary force sent to the Continent helped prevent the Germans from staggering to a victory over France and Russia, Ferguson believes that the price—almost a million young men killed and hundreds of thousands severely wounded—was more than England should have been willing to pay. This may be true in retrospect, though it was not apparent to the people or government that plunged into the struggle in 1914.

Nor did many back then take the long view and realize that even a German imperial victory would have been unlikely to place the other Continental powers under permanent subjection to the German high command. The German civilian government was far from totalitarian and never entirely gave up political control during the war. Furthermore, the high cost of waging the struggle, including the loss of millions of men, would not have allowed Germany to exercise impregnable military dominance. Equally important, Great Britain would have come out of the Continental war unscathed, remaining the preeminent naval power and the world’s major financial one.

Even more significant, as Ferguson’s most recent scholarship shows, European power was falling behind that of the rising American colossus. Although American leaders thought that their interests would be better served by an Allied victory, America’s rise would have continued no matter which side had prevailed in the European conflict. There is no reason to believe that a victorious but battered postwar Germany would have been willing or able to arrest the rise of a vastly richer North American power thousands of miles from the European continent.

There are several qualifications that should be raised about Ferguson’s generally persuasive study. Although Churchill and other prewar English statesmen were demonstrably hostile to the Germans, the German imperial government did stir the pot repeatedly. Both the German naval program, however defensively conceived, and the kaiser’s telegram of congratulations to Boer president of the Transvaal Paul Kruger after an early victory over the English, evoked anti-German sentiment among English statesmen seeking an accord with Germany. Moreover, the kaiser and his blundering chancellor, Bernhard Heinrich von Bülow, interfered on three different occasions with the extension of French control in Morocco.

Moreover, the British were not primarily responsible for Germany’s fear of encirclement. Otto von Bismarck’s decision to “take back” Alsace and Lorraine after the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War led to a bitter harvest. Although the two provinces, particularly Alsace, were full of ethnic Germans whose ancestors had been forcibly Frenchified by Louis XIV, the situation had changed by 1871, when Bismarck annexed the region. Most of the provincial inhabitants, including the Alsatians who spoke High German at home, thought of themselves as French, and anger at the German annexation fueled patriotic fervor throughout France.

Finally, the rift between Germany and Russia, sealed by the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1893, made Germany’s military encirclement inevitable even before the English got into the picture. That rift occurred for two reasons, only one of which Ferguson discusses. The post-Bismarck German imperial government believed that it would have to choose between Austria and Russia, which was then challenging Austrian influence in the Balkans. Therefore, it declined to renew the Reinsurance Pact that Bismarck had negotiated with the Tsar, even though it did not supersede the German alliance with Austria. Ferguson maintains that Wilhelm and his ministers were shortsighted in not seeking to continue some special relationship with Russia, but in The Fateful Alliance (1984), George F. Kennan presents evidence of Russian responsibility for the breakdown in Russo-German relations after Bismarck. The ardent Slavic nationalist Alexander III and his Slavophile ministers established an anti-German alliance with France while there was still a possibility of renewing the Reinsurance Pact. The Russian government looked on the two German allies as an inescapable obstacle in bringing all the Slavic peoples under its control or at least influence.

The well-known German response to this Einkreisungspolitik was the formulation and periodic updating of the Schlieffen Plan, the strategy by which Germany and Austria would fight a two-front war. In its definitive form, published by Count Alfred von Schlieffen in a Grosse Denkschrift of 1905, the plan provided for a German advance through Belgium in order to complete, with smaller armies than those available to the other side, the encirclement of Paris before Russian forces could swallow up eastern Germany. The move into Belgium by German armies, however, ended up furnishing Grey with the “outrage” needed to engineer Britain’s entry into the war. Thus we have the beginning of a general conflict and of a “pity of war” that most Americans today know or care little about. It was an escalating struggle that, as a Pennsylvania Dutch colleague of mine observed, involved “a Fraiser living in Serbia or Czechoslovakia who got killed or else killed someone else.” But it is a valuable lesson in how easily nations can slide into war.