Wearing Down and Holding Out

Pandora’s Box is a monumental history of the First World War written by Germany’s leading historian of the twentieth century’s first great catastrophe. Jörn Leonhard explains the war’s origins, course, and consequences. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Leonhard reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come. He treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy, the everyday tactics of dynamic movement and slow attrition, the race for ever more destructive technologies, and the grim experiences of frontline soldiers. But the war was much more than a military conflict, or an exclusively European one. Leonhard renders the perspectives of leaders, intellectuals, artists, and ordinary men and women on diverse home fronts as they grappled with the urgency of the moment and the rise of unprecedented political and social pressures. And he shows how the entire world came out of the war utterly changed. Here is a brief excerpt looking at the spring and summer of 1916.

“The landscape is unforgettable for anyone who has seen it. A short time ago, this area still had meadows and forests and cornfields. None of that to be seen any more. Literally no blade of grass, not one tiny little blade. Every millimeter of earth is plowed up and re-plowed, the trees . . . uprooted, mangled, and ground up. The houses shelled at, the stone bricks atomized to powder. The railroad tracks twisted into spirals, the hills worn down: in short, everything turned into desert.” On July 28, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme that had been raging since the beginning of the month, Ernst Jünger wrote these impressions in his war diary. Only later did he return to them in compiling his famous book In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel), which made the death-defying young lieutenant and storm troop leader one of the most influential war writers of the interwar period. The diary itself, with its descriptions often written in a dugout, was by no means free of such stylized presentations, which offered a way for Jünger to cope with the constant presence of death. But the diary generally recorded his impressions in a more direct manner, with less filtering and protection, than the book he published in 1920.

Soldiers were aware at the time that the Verdun and Somme battles in the spring and summer of 1916 were giving a new quality to the war. Kresten Andresen, a Danish conscript in the Prussian army, recorded in early August 1916 that hardly any of the Danish comrades with whom he had enlisted in Summer 1914 were still alive. The new-style barrage re and 38-centimeter shells made him think he was beholding “a monster from the sagas.” Andresen soon fell in his turn—which meant that, like so many others in these battles, he disappeared without trace, not leaving a body to be identified. The remains of dead soldiers, often not immediately recover- able, were further mangled, shredded, and in the end literally broken up in the subsequent fighting. In one of his last letters home Andresen—who in Summer 1914, as a member of Germany’s Danish minority, had shown no patriotic enthusiasm for the war—trenchantly summarized the change in his own experience of the conflict: “At the beginning of the war, in spite of all the terrible things, there was a sense of something poetic. That has now gone.” This was also true of the colors of war: no more did brightly colored uniforms enhance the soldiers’ public presence physically and culturally. The gray greatcoats of British officers had become trench coats, and these would also influence fashions back home. When even the typical German spiked helmets were given a coating in that color, “field gray” became a byword for the ordinary soldier. Only the red regimental number marked his particular identity.

What lay behind this new experience of war? At the beginning of 1916, the central question for political and military leaders on the western front was how to reconvert the stasis and stagnation of positional warfare into a war of movement. The year 1915 had brought no decision on the western front, but new opportunities had opened up in the east for the Central Powers; while the Allied offensives in Artois and Champagne had failed at a high price in casualties, German and Austro-Hungarian forces had achieved a summer breakthrough on the eastern front. However, it had not been pos- sible to force St. Petersburg into a separate peace, and in the end Russia had again succeeded in mobilizing its military and economic resources. On the western front, despite the huge losses in 1915, Allied commanders had stuck to the principle of offensive warfare and delayed the construction of defensive lines so as not to weaken the fighting spirit of their troops. The Germans, on the other hand, had intensively built up their positions, which more often than not were situated on higher ground. One of the lessons of the first seventeen months of the war was the dominance of mechanized warfare and the war of materiel, with its heavy artillery and vast quantities of munitions. This lineup connected events at the front with the war economies of the home countries.

The year 1916 gave the greatest impetus yet to mechanized warfare and the “battle of materiel”—and at the same time, with its high casualty figures, showed the limits of any attempt to decide the war by means of large-scale frontal attacks. The battles of Verdun and the Somme shaped people’s vision of the western front and the collective imagination of the world war, and they have continued to do so down to the present day. Together, they accounted for an estimated total of 1.5 million dead, wounded, and missing. Each individual loss carried the reality of war into the societies of Britain, France, and Germany, but also of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India. By the end of the year, there was scarcely one large family that did not number at least one casualty among its husbands, brothers, sons, or grandsons.

Furthermore, the third year of war made it ever clearer how tightly the various theaters of war in Europe and beyond were intermeshed with one another. More than ever, the task was to redistribute resources, to redeploy troops when necessary to places where the danger was greatest. The link between Verdun and the Somme, the British aid to French troops, the Russian southeastern offensive to take some pressure of the Allies on the western front, the transfer of German troops from Verdun to the Somme, the German assistance to Austria-Hungary in Summer 1916 against the major Russian offensive under General Brusilov, the refusal of the German OHL in May and June to support the Austrian campaign against Italy in the Tyrol—all these marked the total context of the war. Strategic priorities had to be repeatedly rede ned to take account of the situation on new or existing fronts and theaters. Romania’s entry into the war against the Central Powers, together with the coup d’état in Greece and the emergence of another front in Macedonia, further extended the war in southeastern Europe.

Each new offensive came with expectations that it would decide the war. The sharpening of decision-making processes and awareness of their consequences increased the pressure on the players responsible for them, and in 1916 disappointed expectations tended more and more often to threaten a credibility and legitimacy crisis for military and political leaders. The search for guilty parties was matched by the sudden rise of savior figures, one of the hallmarks of this year of the war. After the failure of Verdun and the entry of Romania into the war on the Allied side, the former head of the German OHL, Falkenhayn, was replaced by Hindenburg and Ludendorf at the head of the Third OHL.4 In France the popular hero of Verdun, Robert Nivelle, took over at the end of the year from Joseph Jofre, whose reputation had been based on his role in 1914 at the Battle of the Marne. In Britain, David Lloyd George relieved Asquith as prime minister. Old monarchs, too, got caught up in this succession of military and political upheavals: while the cult surrounding Hindenburg—whose paternal figure featured in numerous monuments and pictures in Germany—increasingly pushed the Kaiser into the background, the question of Austria-Hungary’s future became more urgent after the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in November 1916. Although the assassination of Prime Minister Stürgkh in October was the action of a single individual (Friedrich Adler, son of the Social Democrat Party leader Viktor Adler), it was a powerful indication of how deep the crisis of confidence had become. The assassination reflected the rising tide of protest against official pro-war policies, the antidemocratic regime, and the dire supply situation. Finally, in Russia, the gulf continued to widen between the tsarist autocracy and large sections of the elite and the general population. At the end of December 1916, the murder of the ostensible faith healer and confidant of the empress, Grigorii Rasputin, by members of the Russian elite close to the court, illuminated in a ash the erosion of tsarist rule. Each in their different ways, the loyalties and institutions based on dynastic rule were losing respect and credibility.

Austria-Hungary’s future became more urgent after the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in November 1916. Although the assassination of Prime Minister Stürgkh in October was the action of a single individual (Friedrich Adler, son of the Social Democrat Party leader Viktor Adler), it was a powerful indication of how deep the crisis of confidence had become. The assassination reflected the rising tide of protest against official pro-war policies, the antidemocratic regime, and the dire supply situation. Finally, in Russia, the gulf continued to widen between the tsarist autocracy and large sections of the elite and the general population. At the end of December 1916, the murder of the ostensible faith healer and confidant of the empress, Grigorii Rasputin, by members of the Russian elite close to the court, illuminated in a ash the erosion of tsarist rule. Each in their different ways, the loyalties and institutions based on dynastic rule were losing respect and credibility.