Alan Kramer
DYNAMIC OF DESTRUCTION
Culture and mass killing in the first world war
434pp. Oxford University Press. £18.99.
978 0 19 280342 9

Norman Stone
WORLD WAR ONE
A short history
187pp. Penguin: Allen Lane. £16.99.
978 1 84614013 6

In the popular imagination, the Second World War seems to have a monopoly on much of the twentieth century’s worst cruelties – and, one should add, with good reason. From the Nazis’ murderous policies against the Jews, the area bombing of European cities, the Japanese rape of Nanking, the Katyn forest massacre, through to the fire bombing of Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the scale and range of brutality exert a powerful hold, overshadowing much of what preceded and followed it.

While not discounting the centrality of such events, Alan Kramer wants us to re-examine the First World War for evidence of similar violence, in kind if not in scale, and for clues as to why the 1914–45 era as a whole has become synonymous with a particularly cynical type of warfare. He starts his book with the German invasion of Belgium in August 1914, and a scene fairly typical of that scorching summer. German troops entered a small town, with soldiers on foot, mounted artillery (the dreaded Uhlans), baggage and auxiliaries. In this case, it was the university town of Louvain, on the morning of August 19, 1914. As the civilian authorities had already ordered the people to turn in weapons and not to offer any resistance, the ensuing occupation was orderly, if somewhat oppressive. Signs were posted, hostages taken, and billets assigned. Alarmed by tales of German atrocities since the invasion had started, on August 4, the Flemish population remained docile.

When the alarm sounded in the early evening of August 25, however, German troops rushed to assembly points. About two hours later, sporadic shooting broke out. Retreating Germans from the north arrived in the town later in the evening, compounding the situation. A train came into the station; no one was sure whether it contained German reinforcements or advance elements of the British Expeditionary Force, about which rumours abounded. Spooked troops broke into houses suspected of harbouring francs-tireurs, firing wildly and rounding up terrified townsfolk. Houses were torched. Summary executions followed. At 11.30 pm, troops broke into the University Library, one of the most important collections in Europe. Using petrol and incendiary pastilles, they set fire to hundreds of thousands of volumes and manuscripts. Within hours, a priceless piece of European – indeed, world – heritage had been reduced to smoking ashes.

It would be easy, as well as more palatable, to believe that such a crime was the result of a particular confluence of factors that would soon be brought under control by officers eager to maintain discipline over troops. The following days proved otherwise. There were more executions, instances of torture, more houses set on fire, more civilians – including women, children and the elderly – rounded up, and now deported to Germany. Absurdly, even a bombardment was ordered. With a certain methodical precision, the Germans paid particular attention to anything of cultural significance, destroying the offices and records of local solicitors, judges, doctors and professors. With its fires visible from afar, Louvain was considered fair game for pillage by troops arriving during the next few days.

Alan Kramer uses the crime at Louvain as a starting point for a discussion of some of the wanton awfulness that Europeans perpetrated on each other (and the world) during the first half of the twentieth century. The Germans, of course, figure prominently. With vivid memories of irregular warfare during the Franco-Prussian War, German officers were instructed to ignore the provisions of the Hague Conventions on land warfare dealing with civilians and locally raised militias – despite the fact that the German government had signed them – and to instil terror in enemy territory, crushing the least sign of resistance. Other factors played a role. The Schlieffen plan, upon the success of which it was believed Germany’s fortunes rested, relied on the rapid passage of hundreds of thousands of German troops through Belgium – a small nation that, in German eyes, counted for nothing – and living off the land as far as possible. That not just few German soldiers were imbued with a healthy dose of anti-Catholicism, pseudo-messianic beliefs that encouraged them to disdain the physical world (theirs as much as the enemy’s), as well as to view war as a means to an other-worldly spiritual bliss, did nothing to discourage the crimes of Louvain. In other words, Nietzsche, Darwin and Freud, as much as Count Alfred von Schlieffen, played roles.

But Louvain, and the other crimes committed by the Germans in Belgium and Northern France, were not the result of forces beyond the scope of human agency. As news of the German outrages was reported in both the neutral and the enemy press, and as Germany’s reverse on the Marne, in early September 1914, put the outcome of the war in doubt, the German authorities took steps to ensure that there would be no more Louvains. And, with a few notable exceptions, there were none.

As has already been hinted, however, the case of Louvain was not unique, nor was it the first town where the Occupiers perpetrated atrocities. Because of its cultural importance, and because of the number of citizens murdered, however, Louvain has become synonymous with the crimes committed by the Germans in the First World War, as Auschwitz has for the later conflict. At the same time, Kramer argues that, though particularly heinous, Louvain was part of a broader trend – and one not necessarily the exclusive purview of Germany’s Sonderweg. Crimes against civilians and enemy combatants had become part of warfare in the early twentieth century – despite the good efforts of various international conventions and organizations such as the Red Cross.

The Balkan wars of 1912–13, for instance, were fought with the full arsenal of weapons available to the modern nation state, but without the organizational and logistical infrastructure necessary to ameliorate the new technology’s worst humanitarian effects. In a vast wilderness barely penetrated by serviceable roads – let alone railways – casualty rates, especially among civilians, soared. (This in part also explains why such rates remained higher on the Eastern Front during the First World War.) Still worse, these wars featured a novel type of ethnonationalism, which led to the forced expulsion of entire populations in a cruel effort to align ethnic and national boundaries. Where undesirable minorities were not driven from their homes, they were terrorized into acquiescence by rape, forced religious conversion, pillage, starvation. After the second Balkan war, the Carnegie Commission concluded that “It has become a competition, as to who can best dispossess and ‘denationalize’ his neighbour”. “Ethnic cleansing” may have entered the English lexicon in the 1990s, but the deed was invented in the years leading up to 1914.

The enemy within, a recurring problem – sometimes real, oftentimes imagined – for nation states in the era of the First World War, also contributed to the violence. The Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires contained large minorities whose loyalty to their rulers remained in doubt. Even the British, whose crushing of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 was exceptionally harsh, had problems. During the Russian retreat of 1915, suspected hostile populations of Germans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Jews and Poles were deported to the east. Given the prevailing conditions, an indeterminate number, though certainly in the tens of thousands, died.

In Turkey, such violence reached its apogee. A campaign against the Armenians, part of a wider programme to remove non-Turkish ethnic influences from the teetering Empire, became genocide in the spring of 1915. Hundreds of thousands perished out of an Ottoman Armenian population then estimated at 1.8 million. The Armenian genocide, which the Turkish authorities refuse to recognize to this day, and the so-called “Jew census” of autumn 1916, by which the German government tried to refute charges levied by the nationalist Right that Jews were not serving their country in sufficient numbers, indirectly set the stage for the Holocaust.

The totality of the First World War, and by that one means the total mobilization of the nation’s resources in the pursuit of total victory, has to be taken into account. Louvain can be attributed, at least partially, to German attempts to secure total victory over two enemies, France and Russia. When this failed – indeed, as all pre-war plans failed to produce a decisive, quick victory – the prolonged conflict that all belligerents feared, the Central Powers more than the Entente, ensued. Once the static war took hold on all fronts, in the winter of 1914–15, alternative strategies were sought and tried. While the Germans used poison gas in April 1915, the Allies turned their stranglehold on the seaways to good advantage by cutting off “contraband” war goods – the definition of which was flexible and grew to include virtually all commerce. Unrestricted submarine warfare against the Allies, and the sinking of the Lusitania, for instance, were a natural if legally dubious result. The starvation diet on which most Germans subsisted in the war’s final two years resulted in the premature deaths of hundreds of thousands. In turn, the occupied populations of Northern France and Belgium suffered, even if there were no more Louvains; besides being subjected to a subsistence diet, thousands were conscripted to perform forced labour in Germany or to build new defensive lines behind the Western Front. The same logic compelled the Austrians to strip the Italian countryside bare following the Battle of Caporetto and to treat Italian POWs with utter disdain. This was no cabinet war, to be sure. Total war required the dehumanization of the enemy, which included the mobilization of the civilian populace for hatred.

By contrast to Kramer’s innovative approach to the First World War, Norman Stone’s “short history” is a traditional account, with, for instance, Field Marshal Haig as a buffoon, surrounded by “creepy” young officers, British troops advancing in lines on July 1, 1916, and the German war machine as efficient and robust; despite the fact that recent research suggests alternative, more nuanced accounts might be more appropriate. It is also an entertaining history, filled with colour and bombast, less concerned with providing reams of documentation and more with telling an interesting tale well. In this Norman Stone succeeds admirably. Still, as in the assertion that British troops stopped singing their “superb” marching songs during the dark days of 1918 – a fascinating detail, but one for which no reference is provided – one yearns for a level of scholarly commitment that is simply not on offer in a short general history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Louvain or any of the other cruelties that form the central core of Alan Kramer’s disturbing portrait barely warrant a mention.

Craig Gibson's first book, Behind the Front, 1914-1918: British troops and French civilians, is due to appear later this year.

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