GAS, SHELLS AND STALEMATE ON EVERY FRONT

The trenches were not a failure of imagination. They were the logical answer to a simple problem: by 1914 an army could defend itself with a power that no army could yet overcome. A trained rifleman with a magazine rifle could fire 15 aimed rounds a minute at men a quarter of a mile away. A water-cooled machine gun could pour out 500 bullets a minute and, set on a tripod and sighted on a gap, could sweep a field as a hose sweeps a lawn. Field guns such as the French 75, whose barrel recoiled on a hydraulic cushion and so did not need to be re-aimed after every shot, fired shrapnel shells that burst in the air and cleared the ground of men. Against all this, an infantry assault had to cross a few hundred yards of open ground at the speed of a man on foot, the only speed it had.

The soldier who survived this fire found, in the end, that he could dig. A hole three feet deep gave a defender much of the protection he needed, and a few weeks of work turned it into a line of trenches with a parapet, fire-steps, wire in front and a support line behind. Once both armies had done this, from the Channel to Switzerland, there was no flank left to turn. The problem for the attacker was then double. First, to break the line, which might be done with enough artillery. Second, to break out of it, which could not, because the defender could always bring up reserves faster than the attacker could advance. A defender moved by rail along his own side of the front; an attacker moved on foot across ground his own guns had churned into mud, cut off from his telephone wires and out of range of his own artillery, with no portable radio and no armored vehicle to carry him. The army could break in. It could not break through.

Digging in, in depth

The Germans, who held most of occupied Belgium and a swathe of northern France with its coal and iron, chose their ground carefully, taking the ridges and the high spots, and built defensively. By the end of 1915 their front consisted of several lines of trenches, with deep dugouts, concrete machine-gun posts and belts of barbed wire dozens of yards wide. The French and British, who thought of themselves as attackers, dug shallower and less carefully, because they intended to move forward. They also had a political motive to attack: France could not accept the permanent loss of its northern provinces, and Britain's allies expected the BEF to hit the Germans. General Falkenhayn, who doubted that Germany could break the Allied line in the west in 1915, decided to hold there and strike in the east. Joffre decided to attack at every opportunity, in what he called "nibbling" (grignotage), expecting that attrition would wear the Germans down and one big offensive would break through.

The shell crisis

The great discovery of the winter was that the war ran on artillery shells, and that nobody had stocked enough. The armies had planned for a war of months. They had built peacetime stocks for a few weeks of heavy firing, and used them up by the end of 1914. The British were worst placed, because their army was small and their arms industry was designed to equip a small army. When Sir John French launched his first offensive of the year at Neuve Chapelle on 10 March, a barrage of just 35 minutes by 342 guns used a large part of his stock of high-explosive shells. Two months later, at Aubers Ridge on 9 May, a weaker bombardment of 40 minutes, with far fewer guns and mostly shrapnel, failed to cut the German wire, and the infantry were massacred in front of it. French blamed the shortage of shells.

The matter became public on 14 May 1915, when The Times' military correspondent, Colonel Charles Repington, who had been received at French's headquarters, reported that the attack had failed for want of high explosive. A week later the Daily Mail, owned by Lord Northcliffe, attacked Lord Kitchener by name. The affair, joined to the quarrel at the Admiralty over Gallipoli that led First Sea Lord Fisher to resign on 15 May, brought down the Liberal government. Asquith formed a coalition with the Conservatives on 25 May. A new Ministry of Munitions was created, and David Lloyd George, who had made himself the champion of the shell shortage, was put in charge. The Munitions of War Act of July 1915 gave him the power to take over factories, to restrict strikes and to bind workers to their jobs, while the Treasury Agreement with the trade unions allowed unskilled workers, and soon women, to do jobs that had been reserved for skilled men.

Every power went through the same crisis. In France the socialist Albert Thomas became undersecretary for artillery and munitions in May, and car makers such as Renault and Citroën, until then a maker of gears, converted their factories to shells. In Germany the industrialist Walther Rathenau had organized a War Raw Materials Department as early as August 1914 to ration the metals and chemicals that the British blockade cut off, and Germany's chemists, led by Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, found how to fix nitrogen from the air, so that the country did not need Chile's saltpeter to make explosives. Russia, with its weak industry and its enormous army, would suffer most. The shell crisis of 1915 marked the true beginning of what was later called total war: the war of whole societies, in which the factory girl in Birmingham or Lyon mattered as much as the infantryman in the trench.

For the Allies, 1915 on the Western Front was one long attempt to break the German line, and it failed every time. The pattern was set in the winter, when Joffre's attacks in Champagne cost the French some 90,000 men or more between December and March (counts vary widely) for a few hundred yards of chalk. The British added their own lesson. On 10 March 1915, at Neuve Chapelle, Sir Douglas Haig's First Army attacked the German line with a 35-minute bombardment, which smashed the wire and the trench in front of the village and swept the Germans from their positions. Within two hours the British infantry had taken the village and a mile of front. Then the battle stopped. The telephone wires were cut by shelling, and for hours generals could not tell the reserves where to go. The Germans rushed up reinforcements, dug new defenses, and the attack ground to a halt after three days with some 11,000 to 13,000 British and Indian casualties (counts vary) and no breach. It taught Haig that surprise and bombardment could gain a breach, and that the real difficulty was to exploit it.

The spring offensives

The next effort, on 9 May, was planned to help the great French offensive in Artois, the Second Battle of Artois, aimed at the Vimy Ridge. At Aubers Ridge the British First Army attacked after a bombardment of only 40 minutes, mostly with shrapnel that could not cut the German wire, and in the first hours some 11,000 men fell at a cost to the Germans of a small fraction of that number. Festubert, a week later, was fought at night and cost 16,000 casualties for an advance of about a kilometer. Sir John French blamed the lack of shells; the public heard about it in the Times and the shell crisis followed.

The French in Artois did better, at a terrible price. Foch coordinated the Tenth Army of General Victor d'Urbal, which attacked on 9 May after a bombardment of five days by more than 1,000 guns, including heavy artillery. On the first day a division of Moroccan troops, with Foreign Legion battalions, swept up the slope of the Vimy Ridge and for a short time held its crest, with all of the plain of Douai laid out below them. Their reserves were miles behind and came up too late; the Germans counterattacked and the ridge was lost. Over the following weeks the French took the Notre-Dame-de-Lorette spur and the village of Carency, and fought for weeks in the German underground fortress called the Labyrinth, room by room. The battle ended in mid-June with about 100,000 French casualties and no breakthrough.

The autumn offensive and Loos

In September Joffre launched his biggest attack so far. On 25 September the French Second and Fourth Armies in Champagne, preceded by a bombardment of four days by well over 2,000 guns, and the Tenth Army in Artois, attacked together. The British First Army joined with a battle at Loos, on the coal field north of Lens. Kitchener's New Army, the volunteers of 1914, went into action in numbers for the first time. Haig, short of guns and shells, decided to use poison gas, which the British were now making, to make up the difference.

The British released chlorine from some 5,000 cylinders at dawn, but the wind was weak and in places the cloud drifted back onto their own trenches. Even so, in the first hours the infantry swept over the German front line, took the mining village of Loos and reached the slope of Hill 70, which gave a view of open country beyond. For perhaps a few hours there was a gap. The reserves, XI Corps, which included the 21st and 24th Divisions, two new divisions that had never seen action, were held by Sir John French at some distance behind the front under his own control; they received their orders late, marched for most of the night in rain and arrived exhausted. On the morning of 26 September they were sent across open ground in dense lines against intact German wire and machine guns, and were shot down by the thousand, in what survivors remembered as a hail of fire from the second position. The battle dragged on into October, and the British lost some 50,000 to 60,000 men, including the 18-year-old John Kipling, son of the writer, reported missing in his first action with the Irish Guards. The French offensive in Champagne won two miles and some 25,000 prisoners but could not break the second German line, built on the reverse slope beyond the range of French guns; it cost France some 145,000 men, and the fighting in Artois another 50,000.

French goes, Haig comes

The dispute over the reserves at Loos finished Sir John French. Haig had complained privately about French to the King's secretary, and to Kitchener, and French's own account of the battle blamed Haig. The Prime Minister, Asquith, who had lost confidence in his commander after the failures of the year, saw to it that he resigned in December. On 19 December Haig took over, and William Robertson, a former private soldier who had risen to general, became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London. At the end of the year the Allies met at Chantilly and agreed that in 1916 they would attack together on all fronts, Russian, Italian and Western, so that Germany could not shift her reserves from one to another. The result, planned for the Somme, would be bloodier than anything in 1915.

The Second Battle of Ypres began as a sideshow. General Falkenhayn, who was gathering his reserves for the great offensive in Galicia, wanted a limited attack in the west to keep the Allies busy and to test a new weapon. The German Fourth Army, under Duke Albrecht of Württemberg, was to attack the northern face of the Ypres salient, where the line ran along the Yser canal and the Pilckem ridge, using a gas that German chemists had been preparing for months.

The man behind it was Fritz Haber, one of the most distinguished chemists in Germany, who had already shown how to make ammonia from the nitrogen in the air. Haber, who held an army captain's commission, thought that gas would shorten the war and save lives, and he supervised the work himself. In March the Germans emplaced 5,730 steel cylinders of liquid chlorine, some 168 tons in all, in the front trench along about four miles of line between Steenstraat and Langemarck. Then they waited for a favorable wind, for weeks, while the troops grew restless and some officers doubted the weapon. The Germans had already used tear-gas shells in the east, in January, with no result in the cold; no one had killed with a gas on a large scale.

22 April 1915

On Thursday afternoon 22 April the wind finally blew from the northeast, steadily and gently, toward the Allied lines. At about 5 p.m., after a short bombardment, the valves were opened. A greenish-yellow cloud drifted across no man's land. Chlorine is heavier than air, and it settled into the trenches and the shell holes. It smelled of bleach, it burned the eyes and the throat, and it attacked the lungs, which filled with fluid. Men fell choking and coughing, many of them drowning where they stood. The troops in the path of the cloud were French colonial and territorial soldiers: Algerian infantry and Zouaves of the 45th Division, and older reservists of the 87th Territorial Division. Thousands were gassed, and many died; most of the survivors ran, and a gap of some four miles opened in the Allied line.

The Germans advanced behind the cloud, but with caution; they were afraid of their own gas, they had no strong reserves to exploit a breakthrough, and the High Command had planned a limited objective. They took Pilckem and Langemarck and about 50 guns, and then stopped. It was an opportunity lost, and the pause let the Allies fill the gap.

The Canadians and the line that held

To the right of the gap stood the 1st Canadian Division, the first Canadian troops to go into battle, who had arrived in France only in February. During the night of 22 April two of its battalions, the 10th and 16th, counterattacked at Kitcheners' Wood at the point of the bayonet, without a preliminary bombardment, in the moonlight; they suffered terrible losses but delayed the Germans long enough for French and British reinforcements to arrive. On 24 April the Germans released gas again, this time against the Canadians at St Julien. The men tied wet cloths over their faces and held on, some of them for hours, until they were driven back. Over a few days the Canadians suffered some 6,000 casualties; their brigade commander Arthur Currie, who afterward commanded the whole Canadian Corps, was on that field.

The fighting went on until 25 May. The British Second Army commander, General Smith-Dorrien, who knew the salient well, advised withdrawing to a shorter line, and Sir John French dismissed him on 6 May after he advised retreating. Yet the troops had been pulled back anyway, in early May; the Ypres salient shrank to a line a few miles from the town, and its shape would be much the same for two years.

The age of chemical war

Britain used chlorine at Loos in September. By 1916 both sides were firing gas in shells, which could be delivered at any time regardless of the wind, and in 1917 the Germans introduced mustard gas, which burned the skin as well as the lungs. In all, gas caused about 1.3 million casualties in the war, by common estimates, and some 90,000 deaths, many fewer in proportion than shell fragments, but it caused a horror out of all proportion to its killing power. Gas never delivered the breakthrough its inventors hoped for in the west. Its legacy was a revulsion that, in 1925, produced the Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of chemical weapons in war, and that kept the great powers from using them against each other in the Second World War.

The Gallipoli campaign grew out of a hope: that the deadlock in France could be sidestepped, and the war shortened, by striking at the weakest of the Central Powers. In January 1915 the Russians, hard pressed by the Ottomans in the Caucasus, asked their allies for a diversion. Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed to force the Dardanelles, the narrow strait that guards the way to Constantinople, with ships alone. Obsolete battleships, he argued, were no use in the North Sea, and would not be missed; if they broke through, the Ottoman capital would be exposed to their guns, and the empire might collapse. Admiral Fisher, the First Sea Lord, was reluctant; Kitchener approved; the War Council drifted into the project without ever deciding precisely what it was for.

18 March: the fleet attacks

After weeks of bombardment of the outer forts, a fleet of 16 British and French battleships steamed into the strait on 18 March under Vice Admiral John de Robeck. The Ottoman defenses were thin: forts on both shores, mobile howitzers, and lines of mines. Unknown to the Allies, on the night of 7 to 8 March the little Ottoman minelayer Nusret had laid a line of 26 mines parallel to the shore in Eren Köy Bay, a place where the Allied ships had been swinging round to retire. In the afternoon the French battleship Bouvet struck one of them and capsized in two minutes, taking more than 600 men with her. Later that day the British Irresistible and Ocean were also mined and lost, and the battlecruiser Inflexible was damaged. De Robeck broke off the attack. The Ottoman gunners, it was said later, were almost out of ammunition. Whether the fleet would have got through if it had pressed on is one of the great what-ifs of the war; most historians think not, because the mines could not have been swept in time, but the Turks believed they were saved by the narrowest of margins.

What mattered was that the Allies now decided to send the army. A delay of five weeks followed. The Allied commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton, a cultured and charming soldier, arrived on 17 March with no maps worth the name and few staff. His force, some 75,000 men, had to be repacked in Egypt because the transports had been loaded in the wrong order. The Ottomans, meanwhile, under the German general Otto Liman von Sanders, brought up reinforcements to six divisions and dug in.

25 April: Helles and Anzac Cove

The landings began before dawn on 25 April on the southern tip of the peninsula, at Cape Helles, and, farther north, on the Aegean coast at a spot soon known as Anzac Cove. At Helles, the 29th Division, regular British soldiers, went ashore on five beaches. At V Beach, below the old fort of Sedd el Bahr, the collier River Clyde had been run aground to serve as a gangway, and the men of the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers who tried to leave her were cut down in large numbers by Turkish machine guns. At W Beach, the Lancashire Fusiliers waded through barbed wire in the surf, and won six Victoria Crosses "before breakfast." Hamilton's plan to take the commanding heights of Achi Baba on the first day failed; the British dug in a few hundred yards from the sea.

At Anzac, some 16,000 men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed about a mile north of the intended beach, in the dark, and found themselves under the cliffs of a tangled country of gullies and scrub, where no maps were of any use. They scrambled up the ridges, but a Turkish counterattack led by Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, who commanded the 19th Division in reserve and on his own initiative rushed his men up to the heights, drove them back to a perimeter of a few hundred yards. At a decisive moment on Sari Bair, Kemal is reported to have ordered a regiment to attack, saying that he was not ordering it to attack but to die. The Anzacs' casualties on the first day were about 2,000.

Stalemate and the August offensive

Within a month both beachheads were stuck, and Gallipoli became a trench war like the one in France, with the added burdens of heat, flies, disease and a shortage of everything. A Turkish counterattack on Anzac on 19 May was crushed with heavy loss; a truce of nine hours on 24 May allowed both sides to bury the dead. In June, the Allies fought the Third Battle of Krithia at Helles for slight gains. By the summer the Allies were losing men faster than they could replace them, and Hamilton asked for reinforcements. In August he tried a new plan: a big breakout from Anzac toward the heights of Sari Bair, and a fresh landing at Suvla Bay to the north.

The assault began on 6 August. At Lone Pine, the Australians won a vicious fight in covered trenches, as a diversion. At the Nek, on 7 August, successive lines of the Light Horse were cut down in minutes in a futile charge. On Chunuk Bair, the New Zealanders took the summit on 8 August and held it for two days, until relieved by New Army battalions who were driven off by a counterattack led by Mustafa Kemal. The Suvla landing, by an IX Corps under Lieutenant General Frederick Stopford, met almost no resistance on 6 and 7 August, but Stopford stayed on the beach and the troops stood idle, while the Turks brought up reserves to the surrounding ridges. By the time the British advanced, it was too late. Stopford was dismissed. The last big attack, at Scimitar Hill on 21 August, failed, and the campaign was over.

Evacuation

Hamilton was recalled in October. His successor, General Sir Charles Monro, recommended evacuation after three days on the peninsula, and Kitchener, who visited in November, agreed. The two beachheads at Suvla and Anzac were abandoned on the nights of 18 to 20 December, with great cunning: the last men left rifles rigged to fire by themselves, with water dripping into a tin, and the withdrawal was completed with hardly any casualties. Helles followed on 8 and 9 January 1916. It was the one well-managed operation of the campaign.

The consequences, and two legends

Gallipoli cost Churchill his post at the Admiralty in May and destroyed Fisher, who resigned; Churchill left the government in November and went to the trenches in France. For Australia and New Zealand it became the founding legend of national identity: the Anzacs, the volunteers who went to a far-off war and showed courage and mateship in a lost cause, are remembered each year on 25 April. The Australian official historian, Charles Bean, who served at Gallipoli, helped to shape the legend; so did the journalists who criticized Hamilton, among them Keith Murdoch, whose private letter to the Australian prime minister contributed to Hamilton's recall. In Turkey, the defense of the Dardanelles, known as Çanakkale, became the great national victory of the war, and made Mustafa Kemal a hero, the first step on the road to the presidency of a new Turkish republic.

Italy had been the odd partner of the Triple Alliance since 1882, bound to Germany and Austria-Hungary by a defensive treaty and to Austria by a bitter rivalry. Its nationalists dreamed of recovering the "unredeemed" lands (Italia irredenta) still under Habsburg rule: the Trentino, Trieste and the Dalmatian coast. In August 1914 the government declared neutrality, arguing that Austria had started an aggressive war and that the treaty did not bind Italy to follow. The Prime Minister, Antonio Salandra, spoke of a policy of "sacred egoism," to be guided by Italy's interest alone, and the foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, spent the winter bidding for the best price.

The price: the Treaty of London

Austria-Hungary offered concessions in the Trentino, and under German pressure, some in the Adriatic, but not enough. The Entente offered more. By the secret Treaty of London, signed on 26 April 1915 by Britain, France and Russia, Italy would receive, in the event of victory, the Trentino and the South Tyrol up to the Brenner Pass, Trieste and Istria, a large part of the Dalmatian coast with its islands, the port of Valona (Vlorë) in Albania, and a share of any partition of the Ottoman Empire. Italy undertook to declare war within a month. The treaty's clauses on Dalmatia, where the population was largely Slav, would sow a bitter dispute with the new Yugoslavia after the war.

The decision was made by a handful of men. Parliament was largely neutralist, led by the old statesman Giovanni Giolitti, who believed Italy could get much of what it wanted from Austria without war. But a noisy minority of nationalists, futurists, industrialists and ex-socialists, among them the young journalist Benito Mussolini, who had been expelled from the Socialist Party in November 1914 for supporting intervention, took to the streets. The poet Gabriele D'Annunzio returned from France and delivered speeches in Rome that stirred the crowds. The King, Victor Emmanuel III, backed the government; Salandra's offer to resign was refused, and on 20 May Parliament granted him special powers. Italy renounced the Triple Alliance on 3 May and declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915 (it did not declare war on Germany until August 1916). These weeks are remembered as the "radiant days of May."

The army and the front

The Italian army was big but ill-prepared. It had some 35 divisions, roughly 900,000 men, under the Chief of the General Staff, General Luigi Cadorna, a stern aristocrat in his mid-sixties with a rigid, old-fashioned approach to war. It was short of heavy artillery, machine guns and shells, as well as of trucks, and its officers were not used to the war that had taken shape in France. Cadorna enforced a savage discipline, with summary executions and, in some later cases, the shooting of every tenth man of units that had failed, a practice called decimation; he expected nothing from his soldiers but obedience.

The frontier ran for some 400 miles, from the Swiss border at the Stelvio Pass, along the high Alps, to the Adriatic near Trieste. It consisted of three sectors: the Trentino salient in the west, which stuck into Italy like a wedge; the mountains of the Carnic and Julian Alps in the north-east; and the Isonzo front in the east, where the Isonzo river ran through a narrow valley toward Gorizia and the Adriatic. Austria-Hungary, caught off guard, had few troops to spare. For the first weeks, the frontier was held in the Tyrol by local militia, the Standschützen, many of them boys and old men, and a few regular battalions, with German help in the form of the Alpine Corps, though Germany was not at war with Italy.

Four battles, little ground

Cadorna's plan was to break through on the Isonzo to Trieste and Ljubljana, and then to turn north and east toward Vienna. In June his army attacked, and the Austrians, whose commander on the front was General Svetozar Boroević von Bojna, a Croatian general of exceptional ability and an expert in defense, held on. There were four battles in 1915: the first from 23 June to 7 July, the second from 18 July to 3 August, the third from 18 October to 4 November and the fourth from 10 November to 2 December. The Italian infantry, who attacked in dense lines over open ground, short of artillery and wire-cutters, took a few hills, but Gorizia remained in Austrian hands until August 1916. Each battle cost thousands of lives, and the four together cost well over 100,000 casualties on each side. Eight more Isonzo battles in the following two years, mostly in this narrow strip, would add many more.

Meanwhile, high in the Alps, soldiers on both sides fought the "White War," in snow and ice, over passes and summits that were thousands of feet above sea level, and where avalanches and cold killed as many men as bullets in some winters. The Alpini, the Italian mountain troops, hauled guns up peaks by ropes, built mule tracks and cable-ways, and dug galleries into glaciers in which whole garrisons lived. The battles in the Dolomites, for peaks such as the Marmolada and Col di Lana, would continue, with mine warfare and trench fighting at 10,000 feet, until the end of the war.

Italy's entry achieved what the Allies had hoped: it forced Austria-Hungary to fight on a third front and drew off troops that might have been used in Galicia. But it did not shorten the war, and for Italy itself the price was high: some 650,000 military dead by 1918, and a feeling of disappointment that, after the war, fed the rise of fascism (see chapter VIII).

While the Western Front hardened into trenches, the Eastern Front in 1915 remained a war of movement, because it was too long to be sealed. It stretched over 800 miles from the Baltic to the Romanian border, with few railways, and neither side had enough men to man a continuous line of fortifications. The result was a series of enormous, fluid campaigns, in which armies of hundreds of thousands advanced and retreated over great distances.

The Carpathian winter

The year began with a terrible winter campaign in the mountains. Conrad, who was trying to relieve the besieged fortress of Przemyśl (see chapter III), launched offensives across the Carpathians in January, February and March, in snow and temperatures far below freezing. Men froze on mountainsides and in the passes; whole units were lost to frostbite, dysentery and typhus. The Austro-Hungarian army lost several hundred thousand men in these weeks, many more to the weather than to the enemy. The Russians, who had pushed into the passes toward the Hungarian plain, suffered nearly as much. On 22 March, after a siege of more than four months, Przemyśl surrendered. Its commander, General Hermann Kusmanek, had broken out in a last sortie that failed, destroyed the guns, the ammunition and the bridges, and given up with some 120,000 men. It was the greatest capitulation of the war so far. The Russian flag flew over a Habsburg fortress, and Russian hopes rose.

In the north, meanwhile, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, now at the head of the German forces in the east (known as Ober Ost), fought a winter battle in the Masurian Lakes in February which trapped a Russian corps in the Augustów forest. But they were not able to win the decisive victory they wanted.

Gorlice-Tarnów

It was Falkenhayn who found the way. Fearing that Austria-Hungary might collapse unless the Russian pressure on the Carpathians was lifted, and wanting to throw Russia back before turning west again, he assembled a new German Eleventh Army under General August von Mackensen, with a very able chief of staff, Colonel Hans von Seeckt, and sent it, with the Austro-Hungarian Fourth Army, to the sector of the front between the small towns of Gorlice and Tarnów, in western Galicia. The troops were brought up in secret, many of them from the west. On the front of some 20 miles that they were to attack, the Russian Third Army (General Radko-Dmitriev) held a thinly manned line of trenches, its men short of ammunition and its guns short of shells.

After harassing fire the night before, the German and Austrian artillery opened a sustained bombardment on the morning of 2 May, with the heavy mortars joining in at about 9 a.m. and the infantry advancing at 10. Russian accounts spoke of some 700,000 shells in a few hours, a figure that even a British observer at the time treated with caution and that sits uneasily with the thin ammunition stocks of the day; but the concentration of firepower on a narrow front was unprecedented and obliterated the Russian trenches. The infantry advanced, and the Russian Third Army broke. In the next days, German and Austrian columns pushed on, more than 80 miles in a month, reaching the San river and, on 3 June, retaking Przemyśl; Lemberg fell on 22 June. The Russians, with few shells left, were in the position the Western Allies had feared to be in: unable to fight back. Soldiers were reported to be sent into the line with no rifles, told to pick up a weapon from the dead.

The Great Retreat

Falkenhayn tried to cut off the huge Russian salient in Poland with a series of attacks from north and south. The Russians always escaped, though at a price. In July, Hindenburg and Ludendorff broke in from the north. On 5 August the German army entered Warsaw, empty of Russian troops. Brest-Litovsk fell on 26 August, and by the middle of September the German army was in Vilna. The Russian Army was pushed back some 300 miles in places, and gave up Poland, Courland and part of Belarus. Estimates of its losses in 1915 run to about 2 million men, of whom perhaps a million were prisoners. The retreat was made worse by its own scorched-earth policy: the army burned crops and villages, drove off cattle and forced civilians to leave, so that millions of refugees choked the roads, together with the expulsion of Jews and Germans from the frontier regions, on suspicion of disloyalty. The suspicion of treason was general; in March a former gendarmerie officer, Colonel Sergei Myasoyedov, was hanged as a German spy on very flimsy evidence.

The Germans captured great areas of land, and with them a front as long as before, far longer lines of supply and an enemy who had not been defeated. The Russian army, however, was reeling, and the crisis changed Russian politics. Grand Duke Nicholas was dismissed; on 5 September (23 August in the Russian calendar) Nicholas II himself took over as commander in chief, over the objections of most of his ministers, and left for army headquarters at Mogilev. In his absence the government in Petrograd passed increasingly into the hands of the empress, Alexandra, and of the mystic Rasputin, whose influence on appointments was widely resented. The consequences, in 1916 and 1917, are told in chapters V and VI. The front stabilized in the autumn along a line from Riga to the Romanian border, and the Russian army, rebuilding, was soon in the field again.

Serbia ended 1914 victorious and exhausted. The winter that followed was a catastrophe. Typhus, carried by prisoners and refugees and by the lice that lived on them, swept the country in the first months of 1915. Hospitals had no medicines and few doctors, and in some places the dead lay unburied in the streets. By the spring, perhaps 150,000 to 190,000 people had died, by the usual estimates, soldiers, prisoners and civilians together, among them many Austro-Hungarian prisoners. Foreign medical missions, British, American, French and Russian, came to help, and many of their doctors died as well. By summer the epidemic had subsided, but Serbia had few men fit for service when the Central Powers returned in the autumn.

Bulgaria chooses

The decisive question was Bulgaria. It had been humiliated in the Second Balkan War of 1913, when Serbia and Greece had taken most of Macedonia, a country that Bulgarian nationalists regarded as their own. Both sides courted King Ferdinand, a cunning, vain German prince on the Bulgarian throne. The Entente offered Macedonian territory that was not theirs to give; Serbia would not agree to hand it over until the war was won. The Central Powers offered Serbian Macedonia at once, and the prospect of a share of the loot. After the great victories at Gorlice and the failure of the Allies at Gallipoli, Ferdinand decided that the Central Powers would win. A treaty was signed on 6 September, Bulgaria mobilized on 22 September and declared war on Serbia on 14 October.

Mackensen's campaign

Falkenhayn entrusted the campaign to Field Marshal Mackensen, the victor of Gorlice, with a force of some 330,000 men, German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian, against a Serbian army of perhaps 250,000 men, short of guns, shells and rifles and led by the ailing Putnik. On 6 October a bombardment broke over Belgrade, and German and Austrian troops crossed the Danube and Sava rivers. The defenders held out for three days in street fighting, and Belgrade fell on 9 October. Meanwhile the Bulgarian armies attacked from the east and south. They cut the railway from Niš to Salonika, the lifeline of the Serbian army, took Skopje on 22 October, and prevented any help from reaching the Serbs.

Putnik, caught in a narrowing pocket in Kosovo, decided in late November that the only way to save the army was to retreat across the mountains of Montenegro and Albania to the Adriatic coast, and hope that the Allies could take them off. The Serbian government, the old King Peter I, who was carried in an ox-cart, and perhaps 200,000 soldiers and a large number of civilians, including boys of 15 and 16, began the march in the last days of November. It was the worst possible season. The tracks across the mountains were narrow and icy, snow came early, there was almost nothing to eat, and men died of cold, hunger, exhaustion and disease; the dead lay beside the paths. Putnik, too ill to ride, was carried in a litter. Of those who set out, the survivors, perhaps 120,000 to 150,000 soldiers (sources differ), reached the coast at Durrës, Shëngjin and Vlorë in December and January, and tens of thousands had died on the way. The Serbs remember it as their Golgotha.

Salonika

The Allies' response was late and half-hearted. After the Gallipoli debacle, the French and British had decided to send forces to the Greek port of Salonika (Thessaloniki), the railhead for the Serbian front. The Greek Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, who favored the Allied cause, gave his consent, and the first British and French troops landed on 5 October. King Constantine of Greece, whose wife was the Kaiser's sister and who had himself been trained in Germany, dismissed Venizelos at once, and the Greek government declared neutrality and protested the landing. The Allied force, moving north to help the Serbs, arrived too late; it was driven back by the Bulgarians in December, and dug in around Salonika.

For the next three years it stayed there, a large army doing very little. German newspapers jeered that Salonika was the greatest internment camp in the world, and the French dubbed the troops the "gardeners of Salonika." Yet the position tied down a considerable number of Bulgarian and German troops, and in 1918 it would be the starting point of the offensive that knocked Bulgaria out of the war. Montenegro, deprived of its Serbian ally, capitulated in January 1916. By the end of 1915 Serbia, whose quarrel with Austria-Hungary had started the war, had been overrun, and it would lose a large part of its population by 1918. The Central Powers now had an open railway from Berlin to Constantinople, the first stage of the Berlin-to-Baghdad route that German planners had long dreamed of.

In 1914 about two million Armenians, by the usual estimates, lived in the Ottoman Empire, in the eastern provinces of Anatolia that they had inhabited for many centuries, and in the cities of the west, above all Constantinople and Smyrna (Izmir). They were Christians in a Muslim empire, a community of farmers, craftsmen, merchants and professionals who had been protected, under the law, and subordinate in practice. They had also been the victims of repeated violence: the massacres of 1894 to 1896 under Sultan Abdülhamid II, in which well over 100,000 were killed, and the massacre in Adana in 1909. In February 1914, under Russian pressure, the Ottoman government had agreed to a reform plan for the eastern provinces, to be supervised by European inspectors, a plan many Turkish nationalists regarded as the first step toward dismemberment of the empire.

The government that took the empire into the war in the autumn of 1914 was dominated by the Committee of Union and Progress, a nationalist movement led by Talaat Pasha, the Interior Minister, Enver Pasha, the War Minister, and Djemal Pasha, the Navy Minister. They saw the war as a chance to remake the empire as a Turkish state, and they feared the Armenians as a potential fifth column of Russia. The fear was fed by facts: several thousand Armenians from the Russian Empire had formed volunteer units in the Russian army, and some Ottoman Armenians had crossed the border to join them. But most Ottoman Armenians remained loyal, and thousands served in the Ottoman army. After the disaster at Sarikamish in January 1915, the army and the government looked for scapegoats, and Armenians fitted the role.

The first steps

In February 1915, Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army were disarmed and put to work in labor battalions, where many were worked to death or shot. In April, in the eastern city of Van, local Armenians, pressed by the governor's demand for men, took up arms to defend their quarters, and held out until the Russian army arrived in mid-May. The Ottoman government treated Van as proof that the whole Armenian population was in revolt. On the night of 23 to 24 April, the police in Constantinople arrested some 250 Armenian community leaders, writers, doctors, clergymen and politicians, and sent them into the interior; within weeks about 2,000 more were seized. Most were murdered. A few survived, such as the composer Komitas, who never recovered his mind. Armenians commemorate 24 April as the day the genocide began.

Deportation and death

On 27 May 1915 the government issued a Temporary Law of Deportation, which authorized the army to deport anyone whom it considered a threat to security. It was followed by laws that seized Armenian property. The orders were carried out province by province. Villagers were told to leave within days. Men were separated from their families, taken out of sight of the roads and killed, by gendarmes, by irregulars of the so-called Special Organization and by released convicts. The women, children and elderly who remained were marched for weeks along roads to the south, toward Aleppo in Syria and the desert beyond, with little food or water, and attacked on the way. Thousands were killed in the gorges of the Euphrates. Girls and children were abducted and forced to convert. Those who reached the camps along the Euphrates, at Ras al-Ayn and Deir ez-Zor, were left to die of hunger and disease, and in 1916 many survivors there were massacred.

Some resisted. At Van, at Urfa and at Musa Dagh, near the Mediterranean coast, Armenians fought back. At Musa Dagh some 4,000 villagers held a mountain for 53 days in the summer of 1915 before French warships took them off. They were the exception. The Armenians of Constantinople and Smyrna were largely spared at first, in part because of the foreign diplomats and communities watching.

What the world knew

The killing was no secret. American missionaries, German and Austrian consuls, and the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, who pleaded repeatedly with Talaat, sent detailed reports to their governments. A German pastor, Johannes Lepsius, collected testimony and published it. On 24 May 1915, Britain, France and Russia issued a joint declaration condemning the "crimes against humanity and civilization" and promising to hold the members of the Ottoman government personally responsible, an early use of that phrase in an international statement. Germany, the Ottoman Empire's ally, was embarrassed but did not intervene seriously, since the alliance mattered more. The Armenian cause drew support in the United States, where relief committees raised large sums to feed the survivors and orphans.

The toll and the reckoning

Estimates of the number of Armenians who died in 1915 and 1916 range from about 600,000 to 1.5 million, with many scholars placing it at about a million or somewhat more, out of a population of some two million. Assyrian and Greek Christians also suffered massacres and deportations in these years and after. By the end of the war the Armenian presence in most of Anatolia had been largely destroyed, and the survivors were scattered over the world. In 1919 an Ottoman military court in Constantinople condemned Talaat, Enver and Djemal to death in their absence for their role. They had fled abroad. Talaat was killed in Berlin in 1921 by an Armenian survivor, Soghomon Tehlirian, who was acquitted by a German jury.

The campaign in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) began as a cautious operation to protect oil, and became an advance on Baghdad that ended in one of the great British humiliations of the war. In October 1914, before the Ottoman Empire entered the war, the British government in India, which ran the strategy of the Persian Gulf, sent a force to protect the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's refinery at Abadan, the source of fuel for the Royal Navy's new oil-burning ships. Indian Expeditionary Force D, a division of the Indian Army, landed at Fao at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab on 6 November, took Basra on 22 November, and moved up to Qurna, where the Tigris and the Euphrates meet, on 9 December. An Ottoman counterattack at Shaiba, near Basra, in April 1915 was beaten off.

The river war

Mesopotamia is a flat alluvial plain with few roads and no railways, cut by two great rivers, so that movement depended on the river steamers, and there were never enough of them. Between May and June 1915 the 6th (Poona) Division, commanded by Major General Charles Townshend, advanced up the Tigris with a flotilla of paddle steamers, gunboats and improvised boats, in intense heat, through marshes, and took Amara (3 June) more or less by bluff, so that the operation was called "Townshend's Regatta." Townshend, a showy, ambitious officer who had been famous for his siege of Chitral in India in 1895, was determined to reach Baghdad. His superior, General Sir John Nixon, the commander in Mesopotamia, wanted a victory to show that the campaign was worth the cost. In September, Townshend defeated the Ottoman forces at Es Sinn and took Kut-al-Amara on 28 September.

That success tempted Nixon and the authorities in India and London to push on to Baghdad, about 100 miles farther on, with the one division available. Townshend warned that he needed another division. The warning was not heeded. The supply line had become too long: the river steamers could not carry enough food, ammunition and medical supplies, and the wounded were brought back down the river on open barges, with too few doctors and sometimes without even water. By November the Ottomans, under a competent commander, Nureddin Pasha, with some 18,000 men, had prepared a defensive position across the river at Ctesiphon, some 20 miles from Baghdad, on the site of the ruined Persian capital, whose huge arch, the Taq Kasra, still stood.

Ctesiphon and the retreat

On 22 November, Townshend attacked the Ottoman line at Ctesiphon with some 11,000 men, in a plan of complicated flanking movements that required precise timing. At first it worked: the British and Indian troops took the Ottoman front line and reached the second. But they had no reserves, and the Ottoman reinforcements counterattacked. After four days of fighting, Townshend had lost some 4,600 men, about 40 percent of his force, and could not go on. The Ottomans had lost slightly more, but they were close to their base and could be reinforced. Townshend retreated down the river with the wounded in barges, pursued by the Ottoman forces, and reached Kut on 3 December.

He had to decide whether to continue to retreat toward Basra, far downstream, with an exhausted army, or to stop and wait for help. He chose to stay. The reasons are still debated: Townshend claimed that his troops were too tired to go on and that the fortified town, which stood in a loop of the Tigris, could be defended until the relief force arrived; his critics said that he wanted to make a stand and thereby win glory. Nixon agreed. On 7 December 1915 the Ottoman army closed around Kut, and the siege began. Its garrison numbered about 13,000 men, counting combatants and camp followers (sources differ on the split). It was supposed to last for a few weeks.

The story of Kut is told in chapter V. In 1915 the Mesopotamian campaign was already a lesson in how not to run a war: the force sent was too small, the base was inadequate, the medical arrangements were disgraceful, and a political ambition had been allowed to outrun the logistics. A parliamentary commission in 1917 condemned the whole conduct of the campaign. Beyond the loss of the force itself, the long-run effects were large; the campaign opened the way for British control of Iraq and its oil, and for the imperial settlement of the Middle East after the war (see chapters V and VIII).

In 1915 the war reached into places that had thought themselves safe: the decks of passenger liners, the streets of English towns, the sky over the trenches. In each case a new technology, the submarine, the airship and the aeroplane, was used in ways that governments had not foreseen and that publics found shocking.

The U-boat war begins

Britain's blockade was throttling Germany's overseas trade, and the German navy, unable to challenge the Royal Navy on the surface, had a weapon that might strike back: the submarine. On 4 February 1915 Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone. From 18 February every enemy merchant ship found there would be sunk, without regard for the safety of its crew and passengers, and neutral ships were warned that they might be hit by mistake. The campaign was a gamble: Germany had only a few dozen submarines, of which a handful could be at sea at any time, and the rules of naval war required a warship to stop a merchant ship, search it and let the crew take to the boats before sinking it. A submarine, a fragile vessel on the surface, which could be rammed or sunk by a merchant ship's gun, could hardly follow those rules. Britain answered with a tightened blockade, announced on 1 March, in which neutral ships bound for Germany would be stopped and their cargo seized.

7 May: the Lusitania

On the afternoon of 7 May 1915, the Cunard liner Lusitania, bound from New York to Liverpool with about 1,960 people on board, was approaching the south coast of Ireland. The German U-boat U-20, under Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, which had been lying in wait off the Old Head of Kinsale, fired a single torpedo at 2:10 p.m. from a distance of about 700 yards. There was a second, larger explosion within the ship. The great liner listed so badly that the lifeboats on the high side could not be launched, and she sank in about 18 minutes. Of those on board, 1,198 died, among them 128 Americans.

The facts are still argued over. Germany had published a warning in American newspapers on the day of sailing, advising travelers that ships of Britain and her allies were liable to destruction in the war zone. The Lusitania was carrying, besides passengers, some 4 million rounds of rifle ammunition and a quantity of shrapnel shells, which the Germans cited as proof that she was a legitimate target; the British replied that the cargo was perfectly lawful, and that the ship was unarmed. What caused the second explosion remains uncertain: coal dust, a boiler or a cargo of munitions have all been suggested. The Admiralty, which knew of U-boats in the area, had not sent an escort. None of this changed the outrage. In Britain there were anti-German riots, and in the United States newspapers spoke of murder.

President Woodrow Wilson, three days later, told an audience of new citizens in Philadelphia that there was such a thing as a man being too proud to fight, a phrase for which he was widely mocked. He sent a series of notes to Berlin, demanding an end to attacks on passenger ships; his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, who thought the notes too harsh and feared they would lead to war, resigned in June. After a further liner, the Arabic, was sunk in August, Germany gave a promise not to sink passenger ships without warning. The U-boats were withdrawn from the waters of the west, and sent into the Mediterranean. But the crisis had shown the war's direction: the sea, unlike the land, was a place where the United States had interests. In February 1917 Germany would resume unrestricted U-boat war, and the United States would enter the war (see chapter VI).

Airships over England

The German navy had built a fleet of rigid airships, the Zeppelins, and in January 1915 two of them crossed the North Sea and bombed Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn, killing four people. The Kaiser, who had at first forbidden attacks on London for fear of hitting the royal family and historic buildings, relented, and on 31 May 1915 a Zeppelin dropped bombs on the capital, killing seven. The heaviest raid of the year came on 8 September, when the airship L 13, under Heinrich Mathy, crossed the city and dropped bombs from Bloomsbury to the City of London, killing 22 and causing damage worth more than half a million pounds. The raids killed far fewer people than the U-boats, but the sight of an airship caught in the searchlights, overhead, in the dark, was frightening to people who had never imagined war would come to them. Defenses were poor: anti-aircraft guns and aeroplanes could rarely reach a Zeppelin at its altitude, and the incendiary bullets that could ignite its hydrogen came only in 1916. The blackout was introduced in London, and the war became a civilian experience (see chapter XII).

Edith Cavell

In German-occupied Brussels, the English nurse Edith Cavell, matron of a training school for nurses, helped Allied soldiers who had been trapped behind the German lines after the retreat of 1914 to escape to the neutral Netherlands. The network, in which she worked with Belgians such as Philippe Baucq, helped some 200 men to reach safety. The Germans arrested her on 3 August 1915. She admitted what she had done. On 12 October she and Baucq were executed by a firing squad. The American and Spanish diplomats in Brussels pleaded for her life, but the sentence was carried out within hours of being confirmed. The night before she died, she told the chaplain who visited her that patriotism was not enough, and that she must have no hatred or bitterness toward anyone. In Britain and the United States, her execution was seen as an atrocity, and it was widely used in propaganda, and recruiting offices reported a surge. Since then she has been remembered as a nurse who treated soldiers of both sides.

The Fokker Scourge

In the air over the Western Front, the aeroplane was still a weak instrument, used mostly for reconnaissance and for directing artillery. The pilots of both sides at first shot at each other with pistols and rifles. The decisive step came in the spring of 1915, when the French pilot Roland Garros fitted steel deflector plates to his propeller so that he could fire a machine gun straight ahead through it; he shot down several German aircraft, until he was forced to land behind the German lines on 18 April. The Dutch designer Anthony Fokker, working for the Germans, produced something better: a gear that synchronized the machine gun with the propeller so that the bullets passed between the blades. The Fokker E.I monoplane entered service in the summer, and pilots such as Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann took a heavy toll of the slow British BE2 reconnaissance machines, nicknamed "Fokker fodder." The period from autumn 1915 to early 1916 is remembered as the Fokker Scourge. It ended only when the Allies brought out their own fighters, with a forward-firing gun, in 1916.