Consciousness of Sheep
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Insofar as anyone thinks about the First World War at all (and almost nobody does these days) the go-to view is the one presented in the Blackadder comedy series – lions led by donkeys, wasting millions of lives to move General Haig’s drinks cabinet a few paces closer to Berlin. The Somme, Verdun, and more recently (because of the movie) Passchendaele are thought to be typical of the war as a whole… trench warfare in which thousands of troops are slaughtered in a single day, with little in the way of enemy losses or territorial gains to show for it. The picture is presented with an air of inevitability – the accidental consequence of barbed wire (which negated cavalry charges) and the machine gun (which made infantry advances suicidally insane). It had been plausibly argued that had the war broken out a decade earlier or later (with the development of armour and air power) the trenches would never have been dug.
Less often argued, however, is that even in 1915, the set piece slaughter of the ensuing battles need never have happened. This is because, during the winter of 1914-15, all sides had cause to pause and to seek an exit from a war which had turned out to be very different to the war they had planned… the common – but misleading view being that the rigidity of rail-based logistics caused the various military staffs to rapidly lose control of the situation in August 1914.
Misleading, because most histories still cling to the post-Versailles “victors’ narrative,” in which Germany was solely responsible for the war because of it’s “blank cheque” support for Austria-Hungary and because of its meticulously detailed Schlieffen Plan… a plan so secret that they let Alfred von Schlieffen take it home as a retirement present in 1906. Left out of the narrative are such inconvenient truths as Russia encouraging Serbia to mobilise first (prior to the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum), Russia mobilising against Austria and Germany immediately following the ultimatum, Russian and French officials openly discussing the war during the summit meeting in July 1914, and France mobilising before Germany in August 1914. Only in recent years has Britain’s plan for economic warfare been documented – giving a context to Sir Edward Grey’s apparent incompetence during the July crisis (doing just enough to cover his back while never once urging Russia to end its mobilisation).
The British assumption was that collapsing the German economy and imposing a close blockade to deprive it of key materials, would leave it without the capacity to make war within a matter of weeks. France and Russia were more clear-headed, understanding that the Germans would have to be defeated in the field too. The French “Plan XVII” was a mirror image of Germany’s Schlieffen Plan – a drive through Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany to reach the Rhine and cut off the mass of German forces advancing in the north. The Russian plan was blunter, sending two armies against the depleted German eighth army in East Prussia. Notably, then, the combined Franco-Russian war plan for 1914 was designed to counter the supposedly secret German plan.
That German plan – which was a much-revised version of the Schlieffen Plan – was based upon a fundamental flaw in the military thinking of the period… that the advantage lay with the attacking army. The German fear of a two-front war in which the defender was at a disadvantage led to the inevitable conclusion that Germany must attack first. Moreover, because France was the stronger opponent, and Russia slower to mobilise, Germany had to rapidly defeat the French army before turning its armies to the east. This resulted in the narrowly failed six-week timetable to surround and defeat the French army in the field (Schlieffen’s plan to also take Paris was never seriously considered). One reason why the plan failed was that the early Russian mobilisation – which made a European war inevitable – resulted in a much earlier (and catastrophic for the Russians) invasion of East Prussia, thereby panicking the German high command, and causing them to prematurely remove two army corps from the Western Front, creating the conditions for the successful French counterattack on the Marne in September 1914.
Adding to German woes – and bolstering the case that Germany was not responsible for the war – there had been no joint military planning with the Austrians. The German government had simply assumed that the Austrians would mobilise against Russia to draw the Russian armies away from East Prussia when, in fact, the Austrians had mobilised against Serbia and had left the Galician frontier open to any Russian units who wished to march across. When redirected Austro-Hungarian units finally arrived, the result was a series of battles bloodier than those on the western front.
As always, there are many “what ifs” about August 1914. If the two Russian armies which invaded East Prussia had remained in contact and acted in concert, they might just have inflicted a defeat upon a German eighth army whose commander had already defeated himself in his head even before the first shot had been fired. Had it not been for the insubordination of eighth army corps commanders, the Germans would have retreated behind the Vistula, opening the road to Berlin for the arriving Russian armies. At the same time in the west, had it not been for French fifth army commander Lanrezac’s refusal to carry out Joffre’s orders (which were based on the erroneous belief that the main German force was to the east) the Germans would have achieved their aim of driving into the flanks of a French army which would no longer enjoy a line of retreat toward Paris. If the German high command had not over-reacted to the Russian advance into East Prussia, and retained the two corps on the western front, they might just have scuppered the Marne counterattack. And had French commander Joseph Joffre not changed his mind when the facts had clearly changed, then the units which decided the battle of the Marne would never have been transferred west.
But those things did happen. And on 5 September 1914, French armies – assisted by a weakened British Expeditionary Force – opened the counter offensive which would drive the Germans back from the Marne. Although initially successful, however, the French armies faced the same disadvantages that had beset the German advance… that advancing against any prepared defence was suicidal – something the BEF had proved at Mons, where thousands of Germans were slaughtered by rapid infantry fire from entrenched defences.
With the advance on the Marne sector halted, both sides attempted a series of outflanking manoeuvres which – because they extended the lines to the north – came to be known as “the race to the sea,” creating the continuous line of trenches from Switzerland to the Belgian coast. It was the last of these outflanking manoeuvres (which both sides attempted simultaneously) around the Belgian village of Ypres, which provided the first inkling of the war to come – men marched through fields of mud, and mown down by entrenched machine gunners who they couldn’t see, or bayonetted in close quarter brawls more akin to medieval warfare… and at the end of the slaughter, the front lines remained where they had been at the start.
Less obvious (to history, but painfully obvious to those on the front lines) was the topography of those static front lines. The various Anglo-French flanking attacks had foundered as much because of the inability of tired troops to climb steep hills as to the volley of lead showering them. So that, by the winter of 1914, the Germans held the high ridges while the British and French armies were stuck in the muddy valleys where their movements were easily overlooked. With the advantage resting with the Germans on the high ground, the western front came to a stalemate as 1915 dawned and the respective high commands and governments counted the cost.
The Kaiser’s woefully wrong expectation that it would all be over before the leaves had fallen from the trees, is most remembered. But all of the governments which had so casually taken up arms in August 1914 had done so firm in the belief that the fighting would be over within weeks. On a mercenary note, each was also horrified by the cost of maintaining the war… especially the requirement to trade gold for munitions and supplies from the United States. But worst of all was the butcher’s bill. Nearly two million soldiers had been killed or severely wounded in the few weeks of mobile warfare which had preceded entrenchment – more than half in the largely ignored battles between Austria and Russia in Galicia, where the Austro-Hungarian army was effectively neutered.
Little surprise then, that each of the participants put out peace feelers in the hope of bringing the catastrophe to an end. Even at that stage, those responsible understood that prolonging the war risked bankruptcy and imperial collapse, with mutiny and revolution waiting in the wings if the death toll continued to grow. But one thing above all stood in the way of peace… what we today refer to as “the psychology of previous investment.” Having lost between 350,000 and 500,000 men in the advance through Belgium and France (and occupying some of the most valuable industrial districts in the process) German leaders insisted that peace had to be based on the existing front lines. Having lost similar numbers, the French and British insisted that the July 1914 frontiers had to be restored. Nor could either side accept a halfway position (which would have left Germany holding the key industrial regions of eastern Belgium and northeast France. And so, the war dragged on, with each new attempt at industrialised slaughter adding to a death toll which prevented governments from finding a negotiated peace.
By the time the German revolution in 1918 finally forced the conflict to a conclusion, some 20 million corpses lay rotting in the ground behind the front, while another 40 million were severely wounded… all the casualties of the mindset of 1915.
Fast forward 110 years, and that same barbaric mindset is at play once more. As the new Trump administration moves to a more traditional American isolationism, European states are left to ponder whether they can continue to support Ukraine in the war with Russia. As in the 1930s, public opinion in the USA is in favour of ending Biden’s war, cutting the funding, and avoiding any future interventions in Europe (that is, after all, one of the key reasons why Trump won the popular vote, both houses of congress, as well as the presidency). In the UK, social media feeds and establishment media articles are clear that we cannot abandon Ukraine after having invested so much in defending them to this point. Kier Starmer has even promised to put boots on the ground (although a military that has more admirals than ships and nearly as many generals as tanks would be more of a hindrance than a help to Ukraine). In any case, Ukraine has bled enough. Although casualty figures are hard to obtain (and British figures coming direct from the Ukraine embassy are gross underestimates) Ukraine seems to have suffered somewhere between 400,000 and 700,000 killed and seriously injured, together with 12,500 civilian dead.
Russia is thought to have lost similar numbers, but its higher population means that it is better placed to withstand the loss. Ukraine in contrast, is already facing a demographic crisis, not only from the loss of so many working-aged men, but also due to the flood of refugees (who are unlikely to voluntarily return) and from the loss of Crimea and the key industrial regions of the Donbas.
Clearly, if anyone other than Donald Trump had taken the lead in reopening negotiations with Russia, we would now be breathing a sigh of relief and working out how to mitigate the massive economic and social crisis which Ukraine has no means of avoiding. But because it is Trump, social media is full of people claiming (and unless the person making the claim is already making their way to the front lines, it is a despicable claim) to “stand with Ukraine” – a claim which, at best amounts to encouraging millions more Ukrainian men and women to go to their deaths in an impossible attempt to reverse the situation. And at worse, it is to encourage millions more European men and women to add their lives to the eventual butcher’s bill when, without American support, they too face inevitable defeat at the hands of the Russian army.
Too much, it seems, of our distorted view of war has been shaped by a combination of the myth of 1940 and Star Wars. As John Michael Greer explained:
“It’s been 70 years—since the end of the Korean War, in fact—since the United States and its allies last fought a land war against a major power. The entire NATO officer corps got its training and experience in an era when they had overwhelming superiority over their enemies, and they have no idea how to fight without it. (Even with that—cough, cough, Afghanistan, cough, cough—they aren’t too good at winning.) That’s when Stormtrooper Syndrome really came into play, because it never occurred to NATO that Ukraine could lose—after all, our government shills and corporate media have defined them as the Good People!”
So here we are. Ukraine’s last-ditch incursion toward Kursk has failed and has used the last of Ukraine’s offensive capacity in the process. As I write, Russian forces are cutting off the salient, encircling those Ukrainian troops that haven’t already been killed or captured. And on the wider front, along the Catholic/Orthodox-Russian/Ukrainian-speaking divide, as the ground hardens, Russian forces are driving toward the Dnieper once more.
As in 1915, Europe’s elites in particular have sacrificed too much to negotiate a peace. Germany and the UK have deindustrialised their economies through the use of self-harming sanctions which have had no noticeable impact on the Russian economy. This, in turn, has forced those governments to take “hard decisions” (in reality, there is nothing hard about taking money from pensioners and disabled people) and impose austerity measures… which is why “far right” parties are leading in the polls and threatening to overthrow the neoliberal-neocon order. But it is hard to see how prolonging the conflict can reverse the outcome.
If only the spectre of a certain failed Austrian painter did not hang over us today, we might set aside the Second World War (and the mythology of Star Wars) and observe that the Second World War was almost unique in being fought to a bitter unconditional surrender. In the wars that followed – Korea and Vietnam – the “good guys” had to settle for a partial victory at best (and, by the way, the settlements were negotiated behind the backs of the South Korean and South Vietnamese regimes). Indeed, and despite the failure to bring peace in 1915, the First World War ended in negotiation rather than unconditional surrender (with the new German government being duped into thinking it would be part of Woodrow Wilson’s liberal peace terms, only to discover that it would be forced into the punitive Anglo-French treaty which laid the foundations for renewed conflict 20 years later).
For what it is worth, Trump’s bi-lateral (the clue is in the name) summit with Putin seems to be more far reaching than just the situation in Ukraine – although no doubt the Russians will have outlined their demands for an eventual settlement. Rather, the USA and Russia are part of a wider multi-polar world (which also includes China, India, Saudi Arabia, and possibly Brazil and Iran). And the reason for the recent summit has more to do with arriving at a global realignment without drifting into war in the way the world slipped following the decline of the British empire in the 1920s. Indeed, it is not even clear that the Trump administration wants to be involved in negotiating the end of the Ukraine conflict (even if it is signalling that it will not support a European intervention if the European leadership proves that stupid).
We might hope that our leaders can free themselves from the mentality of 1915. Because if they don’t, then thousands more Ukrainians will be asked to die for no good purpose. But sadly, I fear, as Basil Liddle-Hart put it: “If we learn anything from history, it is that we learn nothing from history.”
As you made it to the end…
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