Going to War

a. Did political leaders expect war?

In various ways the war was anticipated, planned, and even welcomed. War was planned in
Berlin and Vienna. It was welcomed in St Petersburg, and to some extent in Paris. Anticipation
of the war was widespread among national political elites. The element of surprise was greatest
for the mass of people who were uninformed in every country.
b. Did the leaders understand what was coming?
Yes, although not fully. Too much has been made of the idea that everyone expected a short,
victorious war. This expectation was widespread only among ordinary people who had no
influence on decision making. German war plans were for a short, victorious campaign but even
their authors understood they represented an outrageous gamble. The idea of a short war was a
hope, not a calculation.
c. Did the people understand?
If not at first, they quickly adjusted. In every country national feeling swung quickly behind the
war effort, with only small and isolated minorities opposed. In fact, without this, it would be
impossible to explain how any country could have supported the devastating casualties and
huge economic burdens of the war for years on end. Only during 1917 did clear signs of social
strain begin to emerge in most of the countries that were at war.
d. Were the soldiers equipped for what came next?
No. In the early stages of the conflict, three kinds of troops went on the offensive: infantry,
gunners, and railway and horse troops for supply. They faced rifles, guns, and static machine
guns. It soon became apparent that infantrymen had no offensive equipment that could answer
the gunfire of a positional defence. This is why attacking infantry so often walked forward to their
deaths.

During the War

When the First World War began no one had an idea of the extent to which this war would be
different from others before. It took some time for politicians, the military and societies as a
whole to adjust to the new ways of this war.
On 20 November 1917 it was the new French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929)
who used the word in his inaugural address to the National Assembly to describe his war policy
as follows:
We present ourselves in the single aim of total war. My policy has
one aim: to maintain the morale of the French people in this, the
worst crisis of its history. [...] My foreign policy and my home policy
are the same. At home I wage war. Abroad I wage war [...] I shall
go on waging war.
In this English translation “total war” is used to render the French “guerre intégrale” used by
Clemenceau rather than “guerre totale.” While “intégrale” stresses the fact that there are no
limits or that no diminution will be accepted, “total” in French stresses the inclusion of all
elements or persons into a process, as is the case with the English word “total.” Clemenceau’s
aim was to stress the fact that there would be no limitations in his way of conducting the war. He
was determined to win the war at whatever cost. The concept of “total war” was thus born out of
the conviction that a radicalization of warfare as well as a comprehensive mobilization of human
and material resources was necessary at a time when France was on the defensive in Verdun in
1916 and after the unsuccessful Nivelle offensive in 1917 when it tried to hold its ground.[19]
After the War
World War I officially ended with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919.
Negotiated among the Allied powers with little participation by Germany, its 15 parts and 440
articles reassigned German boundaries and assigned liability for reparations. After strict
enforcement for five years, the French assented to the modification of important provisions.
Germany agreed to pay reparations under the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan, but those plans
were cancelled in 1932, and Hitler’s rise to power and subsequent actions rendered moot the
remaining terms of the treaty.

The treaty, negotiated between January and June 1919 in Paris, was written by the Allies with
almost no participation by the Germans. The negotiations revealed a split between the French,
who wanted to dismember Germany to make it impossible for it to renew war with France, and
the British and Americans, who did not want to create pretexts for a new war. The eventual
treaty included fifteen parts and 440 articles. Part I created the Covenant of the New League of
Nations, which Germany was not allowed to join until 1926. Part II specified Germany’s new
boundaries, giving Eupen-Malm[eacute]dy to Belgium, Alsace-Lorraine back to France,
substantial eastern districts to Poland, Memel to Lithuania, and large portions of Schleswig to
Denmark. Part III stipulated a demilitarized zone and separated the Saar from Germany for
fifteen years. Part IV stripped Germany of all its colonies, and Part V reduced Germany’s armed
forces to very low levels and prohibited Germany from possessing certain classes of weapons,
while committing the Allies to eventual disarmament as well. Part VIII established Germany’s
liability for reparations without stating a specific figure and began with Article 231, in which
Germany accepted the responsibility of itself and its allies for the losses and damages of the
Allies “as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her
allies.” Part IX imposed numerous other financial obligations upon Germany.

The German government signed the treaty under protest.

For five years the French and the Belgians tried to enforce the treaty quite rigorously, leading in
1922 to their occupation of the Ruhr. In 1924, however, Anglo-American financial pressure
compelled France to scale down its goals and end the occupation, and the French, assented to
modifying important provisions of the treaty in a series of new agreements.

Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution took place in 1917 when the peasants and working class people of
Russia revolted against the government of Tsar Nicholas II. They were led by Vladimir Lenin
and a group of revolutionaries called the Bolsheviks. The new communist government created
the country of the Soviet Union.
1. The February Revolution
The people of Russia first revolted in early 1917. The revolution began when a number
of workers decided to strike. Many of these workers got together during the strike to
discuss politics. They began to riot. The Tsar, Nicholas II, ordered the army to suppress
the riot. However, many of the soldiers refused to fire on the Russian people and the
army began to mutiny against the Tsar. After a few days of riots, the army turned against
the Tsar. The Tsar was forced to give up his throne and a new government took over.
The government was run by two political parties: the Petrograd Soviet (representing the
workers and soldiers) and the Provisional Government (the traditional government
without the Tsar).
2. Bolshevik Revolution
Over the next several months the two sides ruled Russia. One of the main factions of the
Petrograd Soviet was a group called the Bolsheviks. They were led by Vladimir Lenin
and believed that the new Russian government should be a Marxist (communist)
government. In October of 1917, Lenin took full control of the government in what is
called the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia was now the first communist country in the
world.
3. Results
After the revolution, Russia exited World War I by signing a peace treaty with Germany
called the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The new government took control of all industry and
moved the Russian economy from a rural one to an industrial one. It also seized
farmland from landholders and distributed it among the peasants. Women were given
equal rights to those of men and religion was banned from many aspects of society.
From 1918 to 1920, Russia experienced a civil war between the Bolsheviks (also called
the Red Army) and the anti-Bolsheviks (the White Army). The Bolsheviks won and the
new country was called the USSR (United Soviet Socialist Republic).
The Roaring Twenties
Against the general background of economic instability and managerial concern, there occurred
some important modifications in the social order. While at no time in the modern age was
European society firmly fixed, class structure did have a certain consistency before the war. It
was said of France, but it might as well have been said of most of Europe, that an ambitious
individual could move upward from one social stratum to another, but no one could not expect
the strata themselves to be altered. Yet the war changed this general condition also.

First, because it was most visible, there was a political decline of the aristocracy.

Yet the most important change in class arrangements occurred at the lower end of that large
and amorphous group, the middle classes. There, there was a quantitative change in the "white-
collar" workers whose position, if not aspiration, was similar to that of the blue-collar worker in
the factory. The white-collar workers gained in numerical significance primarily through the
bureaucratization of the state during the war. Although the peacetime situation saw the
retrenchment of state activities, government had become a major employer and would continue
to be so henceforth in European history.

More threatening, however, were the markedly paramilitary organizations that sprang up
immediately after the war and that did disturb the domestic peace. These were private forces,
organized and armed as if for battle, and led by former officers who were directly challenging
governmental policy.

Such new forms of collective protest and violence made no sense either in terms of liberal
political ideology or in the considered thoughts of Karl Marx. Neither a social class nor a group
directly motivated by dissatisfaction with the industrial system, the paramilitary group was
further indication of a decline in civic spirit and civilian law.

There were few signs in the domestic scene of the major European countries that could be read
as hopeful. Peace had been achieved, but still the effects of the war worked their way through
many aspects of European life. Economic and social existence was precarious; unemployment
and inflation persisted in the 1920s, even after the decline in the value of European currency
had been arrested and European production figures had exceeded the prewar level.

Instability had become the norm of modern Europe, a situation that few people failed to notice.
The Great Depression
The decade that ran from the stock market crash in October of 1929 to the outbreak of war in
September of 1939 was the most dismal recorded in the peacetime of modern European
history. Unemployment and political disintegration in the democratic West, political persecution
and the establishment of concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and
mounting international tension across the Continent are the major features of these years. Thus
the words of Rauschning, quoted above, hardly exaggerated the sentiments of millions of
individuals who endured hardship and lived in fear. The sense of despair that had dampened
the minds of the "front generation" some fifteen years before was now universalized: to vast
numbers of the population, the older purposes of European civilization appeared to be
hopelessly lost.

In this time of social disintegration, new institutional forms were hastily contrived. At the center
of the European continent, both geographically and politically, rose a new order, that of Nazi
Germany. The stark reality of Hitler and Nazism were confirmation that European notions of
progress and humanism had been debased, made part of the debris still scattered by the
previous war. Hitler's regime grew out of economic confusion and governmental helplessness. It
thus can be considered one of the results of the malfunctioning, liberal, capitalist system. The
last widespread belief in self-generating progress toward greater material well-being collapsed
in 1929.