The Widening Gyre: The Great War and the Remaking of Europe

[Curby]

Timeline of Events: 1914, January-March​

January 1st: With the conclusion of the Second Balkan War, the Great Powers once again take up the matter of Albania. While Serbian and Greek troops have evacuated from the Principiality since the Treaty of London, the boundaries of the new country have not yet been determined. Reeling from their loss to Bulgaria, both Serbia and Greece are pressing for the partition of the country. While the Entente powers have agreed to Austria's condition that Serbia will not be allowed to gain a port on the Adriatic, the matter of Epirus and Northeastern Albania is not yet settled. Austria is open to the cession of most of Epirus, but wishes to avoid the cession of additional territory to Serbia.

January 2nd: The Federal Bank Reform Act narrowly fails to pass the Senate. It returns to committee, which works to find a compromise that will satisfy both Bryan and a majority of the Senators.

January 3rd: Military trials begin for Adolf von Reuter and Second Lieutenant Schadt, charged with unlawfully appropriating authority from the civilian police during Alsatian protests.

January 4th: In response to America being iced out of Balkan negotiations, planned toll rates for the use of the Panama Canal are hiked up considerably. In the coming months, many Latin and South American countries will receive "subsidies" which bring their canal tolls more in line with the initial ones, making clear that the real targets of the policy are the European powers.

January 6th: The Rice Affair. It is leaked that the British Ambassador Cecil Spring Rice has been dining privately with Theodore Roosevelt and a coterie of other Republican rivals to William Jennings Bryan. Bryan denounces "British interference" with the American political system. Despite continuing approval for Roosevelt, polls show the public is broadly sympathetic to Bryan.

January 8th: The Military Courts acquit Adolf von Reuter and Second Lieutenant Schadt. Sporadic protests erupt in German cities in response to the news, and more intense, concentrated ones in Strausbourg and Metz.

January 9th: Britain refuses to recall Cecil Spring Rice, further straining relations between the two countries.

January 10th: The "Movement for the Protection of National Minorities" is chartered as a non-profit organization, with the stated goal of "organizing for the amieloration of the plight of national minorities within the German Reich". On its coordinating committee are novelist Heinrich Mann, protestant theologian Friedrich Neumann, economist Alfred Weber, law professor Hugo Preub, philosopher Ernst Kassirer, Social-Democratic publicist Philip Scheidemann, and Catholic Centre Party deputy Matthias Erzberger. Among its first members is the 35 year old physicist Albert Einstein, in the process of moving back to Berlin from Switzerland. The rather bourgeois cast of the groups founding members, along with their professional-political connections, make it unsavory for the German Empire to attempt suppressing it.

Notably absent is the sociologist Max Weber, who cites "personal differences" with certain members of the organization, leading some within the academic community to speculate on his relationship with his brother who sits on the coordinating committee. Another family member is also absent: Thomas Mann, the novelist and Hanseatic Mandarin. The splits within German bourgeoisie families over the "Zabern Affair" are a precursor of things to come, with some French commentators comparing it to the Dreyfus Affair.

January 12th: President Bryan makes offhand remarks at a press conference praising the courage of Pancho Villa's soldiers, who have won a series of victories in Northern Mexico against Federal Soldiers. The remarks are criticized for violating Bryan's stated policy of neutrality toward the parties of the Mexican Revolution.

January 13th: At a meeting with Congressional Democrats, Bryan expresses impatience with the slow progress of the Federal Banking Reform Act and sets an April dead-line for the drafting of legislation acceptable to both him and the Senate.

January 15th: More information leaks about the Rice Affair, indicating that Rice was hoping to use Republican Senators to pressure Bryan over the Panama Canal fees. Roosevelt gives a speech defending his actions, declaring that he was simply acting as a "private citizen in the national interest of the United States". Polling indicates that though many voters disapprove of Roosevelt's behavior, few have their overall opinion of the man changed by it.

January 19th: In a major diplomatic coup, the United States and Germany work out an arbitration agreement similar to the ones already signed with France and Britain. With grain harvests soaring, Bryan hopes to persuade European countries to lower tariffs on American exports to avoid the depression of grain prices in domestic markets.

January 21st: The British government begins pressuring Russia to accept to Austrian demands over Albania. The British Liberal Government, particularly its radical members, are increasingly dissatisfied with the entente's growing ties to Serbia and wish to see a depolarization of the Balkans.

January 23rd: Russian intransigence over the British request further strengthens the radicals in the government, with many more moderate members starting to agree that Britain has provided too much support for Russia's Balkan policy.

January 24th: The beginning of the Albanian crisis. 500 Ottoman soldiers take control of the city of Vlore, the seat of the headquarters for the International Commission of Control, and declare Ahmed Izzet Pasha the Monarch of Albania. The International Comission, a governing body of officials from the six European powers intended to keep order in the country until its political institutions stabilize, lacks power outside of Vlore, and the strike on the city effectively paralyzes it. The Prime Minister of Albania shortly thereafter declares his recognition of the Monarch, hoping to leverage support from the Young Turks to avoid the partition of the country by Serbia and Greece. Many ethnically Albanian civil authorities will follow suit in the coming days, even those ostensibly affiliated with the "control commission".

January 25th: Roughly a third of Romania's army modernization has been completed. American military attaches believe that within six months, the Romanian force will be able to win a direct conflict with the Bulgarian Army.

January 26th: An attempt of the Albanian Commission of Control to declare martial law throws the Albanian peasantry into revolt. Russia charges that the Ottoman Empire, with the backing of Germany and Austria-Hungary, is subverting the attempt to peaceably settle the Albanian question. Germany vigorously denies involvement in the plot, a claim later historians have verified.

In a call that evening, the German Foreign Minister excoriates Enver Pasha, threatening to withdraw the German guarantee if Ottoman troops are not evacuated from Albania. The Ottomans hold firm, calling the German bluff.

January 27th: American attempts to mediate the Albanian crisis are accepted by the Ottomans, who intend to use Carnegie as diplomatic cover. The Control Commission refuses the attempt at mediation.

January 28th: The German Government meets to discuss the Albanian Crisis. Bethmann Hollweg, the Kaiser, Gottlieb von Jagow, Falkenhayn and Tirpitz are all in attendance. Bethmann Hollweg favors coordinating a response with Britain to force the Ottomans out of Albania, but the Kaiser and military refuse to take actions that could alienate their newfound ally. Von Jagow worries that making enemies of the Ottomans could lead to a Serbo-Greek-Ottoman Anti-Bulgarian axis.

January 29th: Bulgaria begins offering Albanian partisans in Macedonia free transport into Albania and Kosovo, pleased to be rid of the volatile element.

January 30th: Elbasan falls to a mixture Ottoman troops and pro-Ottoman Albanian militias. Much of the country lacks any form of central authority, particularly in its hinterlands.

February 2nd: Informal talks between the German and British governments fail to make progress. The British government considers unilaterally committing more troops to the control commission or imposing a naval blockade, but radicals fear that an attack against the Ottomans could spiral into a broader European war.

February 4th: The battle of Tirana begins. Many of the gendarmerie of the city, unsure of the international situation, refuse to fight. The city falls within two hours.

February 5th: Ivan Goremykin is appointed Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation by Nicholas II, a rebuke of Vladimir Kokovtsov's more cautious Balkan policy.

February 6th: Greece and Serbia mobilize against Albania, declaring that they intend simply to "secure order and return land to the rightful authority of the Control Commission".

February 7th: The "Law of the Jungle" speech. William Jennings Bryan delivers a weekly address warning that Europe is "Falling into the law of Darwin, the law of the jungle where man is degraded to a beast of the wild, and all his higher sensibilities are muzzled by mute and unthinking violence". In the speech, he reveals that the "Mohammedens" of the Ottoman Empire had more interest in "the maintenance of peace and civilization" than "all the European powers which we are told daily are the pinnacles of our modern civilization, yet in truth have begun to descend into a barbarity more savage and decadent than any imaginable by the primitive peoples of this earth".

February 8th: British pleas for the two countries to halt their mobilization orders fall on deaf ears following the imposition of the "loafers" peace. Bulgaria, which has demobilized following the end of the 2nd Balkan War, refuses Austrian requests to mobilize against Serbia and Greece to deter them from attacking Albania. British attempts to force Russia into making Serbia stand down are unsuccessful, widening the rift between the two ostensible allies.

February 10th: International newspapers report the beginning of the "Third Balkan War" as Serbia and Albania begin to move troops into border regions. Numerous columnists observe that at the current pace, the Balkans may experience more wars by 1920 than the entirety of Europe had in the 19th century following the Congress of Vienna.

February 12th: Advance Greek units begin moving into Southern Epirus with little resistance.

February 13th: Germany and Austria announce that they are withdrawing their troops from the International Control Commission, a move treated by some in the Entente as proof that they are conspiring with the Ottomans.

February 14th: Rosa Luxembourg, at the time a socialist anti-war activist, stands on trial for anti-war speeches.

February 16th: Facing little opposition besides roving bands of peasant militias, the Serbian Army advances into Kukes, moving in a column down to the city of Tirana. They intend to force a fait accompli upon their great power sponsors, forcing them to cede Albanian border-lands in return for transferring Tirana and other Albanian cities back to the control commission. At this point, it is only the mountainous terrain that slows them down.

February 17th: Citing the "illegal Serbian and Greek incursions" into sovereign Albanian territory, the Ottomans begin shipping more troops into Albania.

February 18th: Gjirokaster and Korce fall to Greek troops. Despite their rapid success, the Greeks do not push significantly further, wanting to avoid a broader war. The Ottoman forces are largely to the North, preparing to defend against the Serbian advance.

February 19th: In the midst of increasing tensions between the Ottomans and Russia, the Turks withdraw from the Armenian reform talks, further angering nationalistic elements in the Russian government.

February 20th: A sympathetic crowd gathers outside the courthouse in which Rosa Luxembourg is being tried, chanting slogans against Prussian militarism. Police attempts to disperse the crowd lead to several injuries.

February 21st: The Kosovo Revolt: Ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo region begin partisan activities against the Serbians, straining their logistics. In Albania proper, Serbian forces also struggle with partisan activity in the mountain passes stretching toward Tirana.

February 23rd: The Alsatian Citizens Organization narrowly votes to endorse protests at the courthouse. A group of Alsatian citizens begins the journey to the inner Reich.

Parliementary elections in Bulgaria return an absolute majority for the Liberal Concentration for the first time. Widely viewed as incumbents, the Liberal parties have benefited from the slate of new territories recently won by Bulgaria and the Liberal slant of most voters in Salonica.

February 24th: The Albanian genocide begins as Albanian men in Serbian-controlled territory are subjected to mass executions. The resistance to the Serbian advance toward Tirana grows increasingly fanatical, but is still mostly composed of partisan militias which are not capable of direct battle with the Serbian Army.

February 26th: The Alsatian Citizens Organization peacefully protests outside of Luxembourg's courthouse, calling for an end to the prosecution of anti-war activists. An image soon spreads across the Liberal German press of an elderly Alsatian bourgeois gentle-man bearing a sign reading "Better to associate with a Socialist who will steal from you than a Junker who will shoot you".

William Jennings Bryan refuses the request of the Governor of Texas to order American troops to retrieve the body of a deceased American rancher in Mexico, believing that it would constitute an act of war. It is thought that the rancher was killed by Federal soldiers in Mexico.

February 29th: Greece and the Ottomans sign an informal armistice, outraging some Greek nationalists. Nonetheless, the Greeks have managed to secure much of Epirus for themselves, along with a few small Islands in the Aegean Sea. The Ottomans have no desire to face off against the Greek Navy with their logistical route into Albania already incapable of supporting an army large enough to beat back the Serbian advance.

February 30th: The Albanian-majority towns of Pristina, Prizren, Ferizaj, Gjilan grow increasingly restive as news spreads of Serbian atrocities.

March 1st: The Serbs reach and begin assaulting the city of Tirana. Ruptures continue emerging in the Entente as the United Kingdom insists on putting more pressure on the Serbs to pause their advance, while the Russians wish to see the Ottomans expelled for good from Albania.

March 2nd: British pressure manages to stop the Russians from sending warships through the Dardanelles, a move intended to provoke the Turks.

March 3rd: The overstretched Serbian army has trouble completely surrounding Tirana, and supplies continue to find their way into the city. They have been forced to send only a third of their battered army into Albania by the threat of Bulgarian remobilization and Austrian intervention. Still, they remain an overmatch for the mixture of poorly supplied Ottoman troops and Albanian peasants.

March 6th: Tirana is finally surrounded by the Serbian Army. The city cannot be subjected to artillery bombardment due to a shortage of Serbian shells at the front.

March 7th: The logistical situation of Serbian troops around Tirana grows more desparate as an Albanian uprising in Prizren paralyzes the key Serbian logistical hub. Running out of ammunition, the siege is lifted once again, allowing more supplies to stream into the city.

March 9th: The Prizren massacre. Half of the pre-war population of Prizren is killed over the course of three days. 15,000 civilians, overwhelmingly ethnic Albanians, will be killed by Serbian troops. Unlike previous killings, in this one little distinction is made between women, children, and adult men.

March 10th: Ivan Goremykin is appointed Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation, in a rebuke of Vladimir Kokovtsov's more cautious Balkan policy.

March 11th: Images from the Prizren massacre appear in the radical Liberal newspaper The Daily Chronicle, courtesy of British war correspondent Alexander Devine. Despite efforts from the British Government, they will soon appear across most British newspapers. Out-rage against the massacres galvanizes opinion in Britain and further strengthens the position of the Radicals in the British Government; many citizens begin to question the nation's alignment with Russia.

March 12th: As the supply situation of the Serbian Army improves, Tirana is once again encircled. Within two days, the shelling of its defences will commence.

March 14th: The Federal Reserve Reform Act is vetoed by President Bryan, who says that he will not "Sign over control of the nation's finances to private banks uninterested in the welfare of the average American, anymore than I would sign away my land to a man who holds a grudge against my family". The vetoed bill had significant concessions to the banking industry, and though it offered private banks less leeway over the planned Federal reserve system than the initial draft of the law in the house, it was still seen as unacceptable by Bryan. For the time being, the project of establishing a Federal banking system is dead in the water.

March 15th: Congressional Democrats meet with Bryan to consider their next piece of of legislation. Though Bryan has wanted major legislation to limit the power of trusts and enhance the bargaining power of labor unions, Congressional Democrats believe it is imperative that they achieve a legislative victory quickly, before the mid-terms. They propose that the nation's budget surplus be used to create a social insurance system. Bryan agrees, so long as the legislation can be passed over the next few months.

March 17th: Tirana falls to Serbian troops. Ottoman and Albanian prisoners of war are executed outside the city.

March 18th: Congress begins drafting the "Old Age and Unemployment Relief Act", which will establish a national social security system and unemployment benefits.

March 20th: In a public statement, Austrian Foreign Minister Graf von Berchtold Leopold declares that a Serbian advance to coastal Albania would constitute a "vital threat to Austria's security". The statement is widely understood to mean that a declaration of war would shortly follow the Serbian capture of an Albanian port.

March 22st: On a phone call between Edward Grey and Sergey Sazanov, Grey makes clear that Britain will not back Russia in the event of a war caused by a Serbian thrust to the coast. When the French learn of this, they also make clear to Russia that its misbehaving client state needs to be restrained.

March 24th: Diplomatically isolated, Russia informs Serbia that they will not guarantee their independence in the event of an Austrian declaration of war.

March 25th: The Ottomans begin trying to negotiate Bulgarian entry into the war. Negotiations founder when the Bulgarians request the return of territory lost in the Second Balkan War, or failing that, a protectorate in Albania. Neither of these is acceptable to the Ottoman leadership at the moment.

March 27th: The Serbian Army begins to march south, intentionally avoiding a thrust to the coast. Only the intervention of Franz Ferdinand prevents an Austrian War mobilization, urged on by the Austrian Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, who has used the past dozen meetings with Franz Joseph to urge a declaration of war on Serbia.

March 28th: The Liberal Manchester Guardian features several columns calling for an "Anglo-German" reapprochment and the end of the "unnatural alliance with Asiatic Despotism".

March 30th: The Old Age and Unemployment Relief Act makes it out of committee, and debate begins on the floor of the House.

March 31st: Serbian forces approach the outskirts of Elbasan.

 

[Curby]

Hey everyone! This will be the last "timeline of events" update before the actual beginning of the war. There will be two further updates before we get to the Great War: one on the July Crisis, and another on the internal dynamics in England and Germany, which are both going to be meaningfully different than IOTL. Then, I will probably have to take a short pause to do some reading in military history before writing about the war proper. Thank you once again to everyone who is taking the time to read and comment!
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Timeline of Events: 1914, April-June​

April 1st: Harvard University conducts one of the first "scientific" opinion polls on American politics and the views of Americans on a variety of issues.

Regardless of your opinion of his character, how would you assess Bryan's performance as President so far?

Very Good: 33%
Good: 21%
Fair: 23%
Poor: 20%
Not sure: 3%

Regardless of Bryan's performance in office, how would you assess his (honesty)?

Very Honest: 71%
Somewhat Honest: 11%
Not Honest: 12%
Not sure: 7%

Regardless of Bryan's performance in office, how would you describe your personal sentiments about the man?

Very Favorable: 58%
Somewhat Favorable: 13%
Somewhat unfavorable: 12%
Very Unfavorable: 10%
Not Sure: 7%

In your view, which best describes the relationship of the [United Kingdom] to the United States?

A close ally: 6%
A friend: 18%
A competitor: 24%
A rival: 23%
An enemy: 4%
Not sure: 15%

In your view, which best describes the relationship of the [German Empire] to the United States?

A close ally: 1%
A friend: 6%
A competitor: 35%
A rival: 14%
An enemy: 5%
Not sure: 39%

In your view, which best describes the relationship of [France] to the United States?

A close ally: 3%
A friend: 15%
A competitor: 23%
A rival: 5%
An enemy: 2%
Not sure: 52%

If war were to break out in Europe between the United Kingdom and Germany, what do you think the United States should do?

Go to war against Germany: 3%
Help England in its war with Germany, but don't intervene directly: 17%
Help Germany in its war with England, but don't intervene diectly: 5%
Go to war against England: 1%
Stay out of the war, and try to help the Europeans make peace: 45%
Stay out of the war, and leave the Europeans to their fighting: 11%
Not sure: 18%

April 2nd: The capture of Torreon secures the hold of Pancho Villa's forces over North-Central Mexico.

April 4th: Serbian troops march toward Elbasan, a vital logistical hub for the Ottomans.

April 8th: The Tampico Affair. Mexican authorities arrest eight American sailors from the gunship Dolphin, currently docking in Tampico Harbor. The Mexican President Victoriano Huerta explains that they were mistaken for Constitutionalists, but the move causes outrage in the United States, further exacerbated by the refusal of the Mexican President to give a written apology or provide the departing soldiers with a 21-gun salute. Many expect a firm response from President Bryan, who despite his public neutrality on the issue is rumored to have sympathies for the rebels.

April 9th: Serbian troops reach the outskirts of Elbasan after skirmishes with Albanian partisans and retreating Ottoman soldiers.

April 10th: President Bryan committs a major gaffe when he praises the decision of 160,000 Illinois women to register for local township elections and vote for prohibitionist candidates. The "wets" are a vital part of the Democratic constituency in Northeastern states, and Bryan has thus far intentionally avoided speaking about his personal convictions on the matter for fear of splintering the Democratic base. He later clarifies that he was praising the "Civic activism" of the women and their decision to become "participants in the political process" rather than the particular candidates they voted for.

April 11th: In Michigan, the striking workers of the Western Federation of Miners win a series of concessions after the newly formed Department of Labor intervenes on their behalf.

April 12th: Serbian troops begin laying siege to Elbasan, forcing the Ottoman Empire to re-enter into negotiations with Bulgaria for their entry into the war. Bulgaria at first demands all of the lands ceded in the Second Balkan War be returned, hoping to use the desparate situation in Albania to their advantage.

April 14th: President Bryan begrudgingly agrees, after significant pressure from both Woodrow Wilson and his own political advisors, not to issue a public statement of support for William Sulzer's Anti-Tammany, prohibitionist American Party in New York. The same day, he signs off on a military response in Mexico, and backs a scheme to ship extensive amounts of artillery, small arms, and medical supplies to Pancho Villa's troops in the North.

April 16th: Edward Grey and Gottlieb von Jagow meet privately to discuss the Albanian affair. Jagow confides that he has no desire to see Europe "pulled into a war by the Turks", but explains that the Kaiser won't support any policy that could alienate the Ottomans. Grey is convinced that the Germans did not have foreknowledge of the Turkish coup, and proposes a six power conference to ice out the Ottomans and Serbs and impose a settlement. Both sides now need to convince their respective allies to participate in such a conference.

April 18th: Russia and Austria both insist on conditioning six power talks on the acceptance of their own proposals, irritating their allies. The Russians demand that any talks only occur if all sides agree on a return of the Control Comission to Albania and the recognition of at least some of the Greco-Serbian territorial gains. They agree to drop the first condition within a day when it is explained that the Germans would never agree to a conference with this condition.

Austria demand that all six powers agree that no Albanian territory be ceded to Serbia before such a conference begins, a condition which the Russians will not accept.

April 20th: The beginning of the second and bloodiest phase of the Colorado Coalfield Wars, a conflict that pits striking miners in Rockefeller-owned iron mines against private security forces.

April 21st: After reaching a deal with the Ottomans that would see them regain control of Ottoman lands west of Adrianople, Bulgaria declares war on Serbia, citing as their casus belli the "Illegal Serbian incursion onto sovereign Albanian territory and subsequent crimes against the Albanian people". The declaration throws a span in the works of the planned six power conference; hopes for a peaceful resolution to the crisis had begun to mount after Germany convinced Austria to agree to the talks without conditions.

April 22nd: A diplomatic incident occurs between Germany and Austria. The Germans, recalling the earlier Austrian attempt to have the Bulgarians mobilize, suspect that Austria has maneuvered without German consultation to secure Bulgarian entry into the war. The Austrians are outraged at this German accusation, not only because of its falsity, but also because they believe that as a great power, they have the right to conduct independent diplomacy. German and Austrian diplomats spend several hours yelling at one another, creating acrimony between the two governments.

German suspicions will only grow in the coming days as Austria, feeling that the war will now go decisively in the Bulgarians' favor, prevaricate further on the question of a six-power conference.

April 23rd: The Old Age and Unemployment relief act passes Congress by overwhelming margins as progressive Republicans vote with Democrats to forward the legislation.

John Rockefeller pointedly refuses Bryan's requests to mediate between the parties in the Coalfield War, prompting Bryan to denounce the "Aristocracy of Iron and Coal who believe themselves superior to the elected government of this republic".

April 24th: President Bryan addresses Congress, requesting an authorization for the use of military force against Mexico.

April 25th: Brazilian Military officer Candido Rondon dies near the end of the Rondon expedition in the Amazon. Theodore Roosevelt had initially planned to participate in the expedition but was convinced by Republican political operatives to stay in America to help the Republican Party organize opposition to the Bryan Presidency.

April 26th: As the Colorado miner's war worsens, Bryan calls off the planned invasion of Veracruz, instead redirecting the marine regiment toward Colorado. Bryan invokes the insurrection act of 1807 for the first time since 1894, and instructions are given for the 4th Marine Regiment to take an "impartial" attitude and disarm all the parties involved in the conflict.

April 27th: The Bulgarian offensive against Serbia encounters much greater resistance than anticipated. The Serbian military intelligence unit had successfully predicted the possibility of a Bulgarian intervention weeks ago, and defensive works, along with French machine guns, prove devastating to the Bulgarian offensive. Pirot, the main axis of the Bulgarian offensive, becomes a meatgrinder for both the Serbian and Bulgarian armies.

April 28th: The arrival of the 4th Marine Regiment forces both the miners and private security forces to disarm.

April 30th: President Bryan empowers the Department of Labor to "impose an agreement which ensures the miners do not feel the need to continue their strike". Labor secretary William Wilson, the secretary of Labor and a former labor organizer, will meet with the heads of several miner's unions to create a plan for ending the strike over the course of the next few months.

May 1st: With suspicions high of perfidious Austrian involvement in the Bulgarian declaration of war, the Bosnian Serbs Gavrilo Princip and Trifko Grabez receive training from the Serbian military for a planned assassination attempt on Franz Ferdinand.

May 3rd: The soldiers of the 4th Marine Regiment are slowly rotated out by a mixture of national guardsmen and regular military personnel. They are scheduled to begin their assault on Veracruz within two weeks.

May 4th: The Bulgarian Army breaks through around Zajecar, threatening the Serbian trenches in Pirot.

May 6th: Serbian reinforcements diverted from Albania manage to contain the breakthrough in Zajecar. Though the town falls, the Serbian position near Pirot is not unlodged.

May 9th: A small Bulgarian offensive in Macedonia, aiming to break the stasis further North, fails to gain ground. The mountainious terrain proves exceptionally difficult to assault. The Bulgarians request the presence of Ottoman troops on Bulgarian soil.

May 14th: Soldiers from Turkey slowly stream into Bulgaria. Effective coordination between the two armies is hampered by the lack of a shared language and lingering animosities from the First Balkan War. Nonetheless, the presence of Turkish troops will allow Bulgarian troops to be diverted from the south, enabling additional offensives in the north.

May 15th: In the Kremlin, the potential presence of Ottoman troops on Serbian soil is received with alarm. Faced with the changed balance of forces, the Russians agree to drop all of their conditions for a six power conference, though by this point, the Austrians are refusing to engage, believing that Serbia is going to finally be dealt a "decisive" blow. Germany soon begins to exert more pressure on Austria, but the acrimony from the previous weeks makes things slow-going.

May 17th: The Marine Regiment begins their assault on Veracruz. The delay in the operation has led to growing suspicions in the Mexican Government, and the area has been reinforced with additional Federal troops. Over 400 marines will lose their lives in the operation.

May 19th: Ethnic Greeks in Northern Epirus revolt and declare independence from Ottoman Albania, placing the Greek Government in an exceptionally difficult position. An armistice has already been signed with the Ottomans, and there is little belief in the Greek Government of the chance of a genuine victory when it would also likely involve conflict with Bulgaria.

May 20th: The Turkish Government condemn the Epirus Revolt and hint at the involvement of the Greek Government in it, but over the next few weeks, they will take no military action against the "autonomous government of Northern Epirus". Their hands are full with the Serbians, not to mention the increasingly restive Arabs.

May 23rd: A renewed Bulgarian offensive in the Zajecar area finally breaks through Serbian lines, forcing a westward evacuation from Pirot toward the key logistical hub of Nish.

May 24rd: Serbian forces finally take Elbasan. Despite the capture of the city, the balance of power in Albania has slowly swung away from the Serbs as the Ottomans improve their naval supply lines and begin establishing logistic routes over land through Bulgaria. The Serbians have also been forced to divert many troops stationed in Albania to make up losses on the Pirot-Zajecar front.

May 29th: The Old Age and Unemployment Relief Act comfortably passes the Senate. It will be signed into law later that day by President Bryan, creating a social security scheme similar to the German one.

June 1st: With the miner's war fresh in his memory, Bryan presses for a massive bill that will institute a national minimum wage, create new industrial regulations, limit the work-day to eight hours, empower the ability of the Department of Labor to arbitrate labor disputes, and give the department of justice new antitrust powers. He is forced to choose between these priorities;eventually, it is decided to introduce in concert separate bills: one for an eight hour work-day and national minimum wage, and another to give the department of labor more teeth to adjudicate labor disputes.

June 2nd: Gavrilo Princip and Trifko Grabez cross over the Drina River. Over the next few weeks, they will make preparations for their assassination attempt of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

June 4th: Flush with American arms, Pancho Villa's forces land a crushing blow to Huerta's Federal's Government at the battle of Zapatecas. The silver mining town has a crucial railroad junction that is required to advance on Mexico City from the north.

June 5th: Bulgarian forces overrun the towns of Knjazevac and Negotin. The Serbian Army in the North retreats toward Petrovac and Petrujevac, hoping to entrench and shorten their lines.

June 7th: Attempts to form a new miners union associated with the IWW in Montana largely peter out, as the Western Federation of Miners rapidly attracts more membership.

June 10th: Bulgarian attacks on Nish are rebuffed by dug-in Serbian troops. The town's position along two branches of the Morava river makes it difficult to encircle.

June 12th: The Austrians agree to engage the six-power conference after the German Foreign Minister von Jagow finally manages to convince the Austrian government that Germany will press hard for Austrian interests at the planned talks. They are scheduled to begin on June 24th.

June 15th: As Ottoman-Bulgarian forces stream up toward Petrovac, there are increasing reports of atrocities committed against Serbian villagers "in revenge for Albania". The Russian Government has to be talked down from a pre-emptive mobilization by the promise of a "just settlement" in the six-power talks.

June 16th: Secret Russian attempts begin to lure Romania into a declaration of war on Bulgaria. Russia intentionally avoids letting either Britain or France know of the attempts; Nicholas II, increasingly distrustful of the British, fears that they will shoot down any attempts to broaden the war.

June 18th: Romania responds with skepticism to the Russian entreaties. Though their army modernization project is nearly complete, American agricultural equipment will continue arriving for at least the next two years, and a declaration of war with Bulgaria would almost certainly end the American aid. There is also not much land in Bulgaria which Romania truly desires. Nonetheless, the Russians persist, skeptical of the ability of the six power conference to achieve any lasting peace in the region, and believing that a Romanian intervention would at least offer them a stronger hand in negotiations.

June 21st: Petrujevac, one of the largest cities in Serbia, falls to a joint Bulgarian-Ottoman offensive. Bulgarian forces reach the outskirts of Petrovac the same day. If the city falls, the gate-way to Belgrade will be opened. The arrival of Ottoman Forces has allowed the Bulgarian forces in the north to continue advancing without doing much to secure their Southern flank, which is manned by several Ottoman divisions.

June 24th: The six powers meet to settle the Albanian Crisis. Given the facts on the ground and the disputes between the great powers, it is agreed that an independent Serbia with its territorial integrity intact and Ottoman suzerainty over Albania are non-negotiable.

June 25th: Pancho Villa's forces march south toward Mexico City, taking the town of Leon. The position of President Victoriano Huerta is increasingly fragile as the armies of Obregon, Zapata, and Villa squeeze out the last remaining Federal strongholds.

June 28th: Two events occur which begin the July Crisis.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, are shot by Bosnian Serbs while inspecting a military exercise in Sarajevo. Though both survive, Sophie of Hohenberg is in critical condition for a little under a week, and will be wheel-chair bound for the rest of her life. The Archduke's injuries are more minor, and he will attend the emergency meeting in Vienna the next day. Given the current military clique in control of the Serbian government, few doubt their involvement.

In Romania, the American Ambassador discovers the Russian plot to draw Romania into the war. His conversation with a friend at a restaurant is overheard by a member of the British diplomatic staff, who cables the information to the British embassy. The British embassy in turn informs London of this. Shortly thereafter, the Romanian ambassador in Britain, Nicolae Misu, is called into the office of Edward Grey, who successfully browbeats him into admitting to the Russian plot. He insists that Romania did not have any intention of involving itself in the war.

For now, news of the affair is intentionally kept from the public by the increasingly divided Liberal Government, but there is a great deal of outrage with Russia in the Britain Foreign Ministry for maneuvering to widen the war during the course of the conference meant to settle it.

June 29th: Gavrilo Princip confesses during police investigation to being trained by both the Black Hand and Serbian military.

H.H. Asquith and William Jennings Bryan send cables to Franz Joseph expressing sympathy and prayers for Franz and Sophie.

At the emergency meeting of the Austrian government, it is (somewhat ironically) only the intervention of Franz Ferdinand, who pleads for caution, which manages to avoid an Austrian mobilization against Serbia.

June 30th: Austria withdraws from the six power conference. Russia does so later that day.

 

[Curby]

Excerpts from the book, The End of the Belle Époque, Reginald Bassett

Published by Cambridge University Press © 1952, Cambridge, The United Kingdom

...The most striking fact about the diplomatic period preceding the July Crisis was the improvement of the position of the Central Powers within the Balkans. The Second Balkan War, if contained as a purely local affair, may have perhaps seen the balance of power preserved in the region, but the increasing Austrian alignment with Bulgaria and the subsequent arming of Greco-Serbian forces by the Entente had the effect of turning it into a proxy confict and hardening diplomatic allegiances that were not necessarily set in stone. Without the involvement of the great powers in the conflict, it is possible that Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans would not have been perceived by Russia as a terminal threat to its interests in the region.

As it was, on the eve of the July Crisis the client states of the Central Powers held a swathe of territory running from the Black Sea to Durres. Bulgarian forces were approaching Belgrade, and Salonica was Bulgarian. In large part, the Austrian-Ottoman-Bulgarian axis in the Balkans had rendered moot any real concern about Entente "encirclement". This situation has led many historians to be skeptical that the war could have been caused principally by the Central Powers: the logic is that a winner would not feel the need to provoke a conflict. Unsurprisingly, the blame is often placed on larger-scale, "structural" factors, or on Russia or the ambivalence of the Russo-British alliance.

Yet it is now clear that the blame for the war lies principally with the German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, who conspired with the German military staff to throw Europe into war. On the 29th of June, Bethmann Hollweg instructed the diplomatic staff to restrain Austria from issuing an ultimatum to Serbia. This was not a pacific gesture, but an attempt to buy time as he consulted with military leaders to determine whether a European war would be in Germany's interest. The Austrians, who had diverted much of their soldiers to help collect the harvest, were not planning on issuing their ultimatum until at least the middle of July, as they were not prepared for war. Still, this seemed to be more of a purely precautionary measure: the internal correspondence of Austrian diplomats indicates that they intended to keep the ultimatum light and relatively easy for Serbia to accept. With Bulgarian forces soon to be laying siege to Belgrade, the more diplomatically-minded Hungarian Prime Minister Istvan Tisza convinced the rest of the ministerial council on July 2nd that there was no need to write an ultimatum that unduly provoked the Russians. The announcement later that week of Sophia of Hohenburg's recovery calmed tensions further.

At this point, if Austria had restrained its Bulgarian client, they may have avoided the bellicose Russian response that was to follow. With both the French and particularly the British aiming to restrain Russia, a deal may have been brokered that saw a territorially intact Serbia remain while ensuring de facto Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans. This would have been yet another victory for the central powers. Nonetheless, though they had decided not to intervene in the conflict themselves for now, they did give the Bulgarians a "blank check" to proceed with the assault on Belgrade. In truth, this check came more from the Germans than the Austrians, who believed in the aftermath of the Romanian incident that the British may not intervene if the crisis caused a European war.

On July 7th, Russia mobiized against the Ottoman Empire and also put their military districts in Kazan and Turkestan on pre-mobilization footing. This was a gesture explicitly intended not to provoke the Central Powers, as the Russians still felt as if they did not have the support of the British for a general european war. The refusal to put the West Russian military districts in Poland, the Baltics, and Ukraine on even a pre-mobilization, "preparatory to war" footing indicated this. The Germans understood this too: several military observers would report back on the 9th that they did not believe that the Russians aimed to start a general European war.

On July 10th, Bethmann Hollweg, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Falkenhayn met in Berlin. With the British government teetering on the brink and the Russians potentially isolated, Hollweg believed he was on the cusp of peacefully breaking the entente asunder. A confidential cable to the foreign ministry later that day announced the intention of using the crisis "…To isolate Russia from Britain as Bismarck played the South German states against the French, then to force on it the recognition of a new reality in the Balkans and West Asia". Falkenhayn, meanwhile, was pushing for an immediate mobilization against both Russia and France. This was in line with traditional German military thinking, which called for a quick mobilization against France to allow Germany to knock it out of a two front war before Russia could bring to bear its large army on East Prussia. But several junior officers in attendance who had been in contact with reconnaissance units in Russia explained that the partial mobilization in the Southern districts would have the effect of making an eventual Russian mobilization in the North more difficult.

This allowed Bethmann Hollweg to persuade the Kaiser to avoid an immediate, pre-emptive mobilization and gave him time for his "diplomatic" solution, which in fact amounted to an abandonment of his Ottoman allies. By pointedly refusing to back the Ottomans after the "Albanian Crisis", Bethmann Hollweg both curried favor with the British government and successfully convinced the Russians that a war against the Ottomans would not become a larger, European one. Hollweg hoped that a Russian declaration of war against the Ottomans and Bulgaria would prompt a more formal British withdrawal from the Entente, as traditional British fears of Russian control of the Straits of Dardanelles would once again take prominence in British foreign policy.

Crucially, Bethmann Hollweg did not consult with either the Austrians or Bulgarians before making this decision. While the Germans may have been willing to sacrifice the Turks for a long-term realignment of British loyalties, the Austrians perceived any incursion of the Russians into Anatolia as a potentially existential threat to their position in the Balkans. At this point, the Bulgarians felt similarly. Upon being notified of the German decision, the Austrians in effect threatened the Germans with a European War, stating that the refusal of Germany to back the Turks against the Russians would lead to a "much harsher" ultimatum to Serbia. Germany might be willing to sanction a localized Turko-Russian war, but it would not be able to stand back as the Russians invaded Galicia and Hungary.

On the 16th, Bethmann Hollweg, Wilhelm II, and Falkenhayn met again. This time, Wilhelm II upbraided Bethmann Hollweg for abandoning both the Ottomans and Austrians. Once again, Falkenhayn pressed for a mobilization, but Wilhelm II refused once more, believing that the Russians could be dissuaded from attacking Turkey with some firm diplomacy. Bethmann Hollweg was instructed to do whatever was necessary to re-assure the Austrians of the German commitment to their security.

Later that day, Bethmann Hollweg and Falkenhayn met privately. Both were concerned that despite his bellicose rhetoric, Wilhelm II would be unwilling to go to war if it turned out to be necessary. Though we do not have minutes of this private meeting, a note in Hollweg's journal states "Falkenhayn makes point that war, if necessary, would be best after France-Russia summit…ensures less coordination". The "France-Russia summit" was a visit of Poincare, the French President, and Viviani, the Prime Minister, to St. Petersburg from July 19-24. It was reasoned that a war against the Entente would go more smoothly if its leaders could not communicate as easily in its opening days.

On the 17th, the Germans put out another statement on the Ottoman-Russian crisis, this time intentionally adoping a stance of strategic ambiguity. At the same time, the Austrians were re-assured that the Germans would participate in any war that saw the Russians approach Istanbul. Reluctantly, the Austrians agreed to deliver the initial, ligher version of the ultimatum to Serbia. It called for the suppression of publications which incite hatred of Austria-Hungary, the dissolution of the Serbian nationalist organization "Narodna Odbrana", the elimination of anti-Austrian propaganda within school textbooks, the arrest of known collaborators with the assassins, and the cessation of arms traffic into Austria-Hungary.

On the 20th, Serbia issued a blanket refusal to abide by the terms of the ultimatum. There is no doubt that this refusal needlessly inflamed matters. The thinking in the Serbian government seemed to be that the only way to avoid being reduced to a Bulgarian rump state was Russian intervention in the Albanian Crisis. But even after being assured of French support, the Russians refused to provide Serbia with its full backing, insisting that they accept the ultimatum. In response, the Serbs committed an act of political suicide, refusing the ultimatum in the hope that an Austrian declaration of war would force the Russians' to intervene on their behalf against both Bulgaria and Austria.

The Serbian refusal to negotiate led to outrage within both Austria and Germany. Some have argued that this refusal is what led Bethmann Hollweg to conclude that war with Russia was inevitable, but the Falkenhayn-Hollweg meeting and the correspondence in its immediate wake indicates that war with Russia was being seriously contemplated before the Serbian refusal. Nonetheless, it certainly had the effect of hardening the German position. On the 22nd, the german foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow visited Austria and telegrammed to Berlin that Austria would not be ready for war before the 28th, indicating that war planning was already well underway.

The British offered to mediate on the 22nd. This was an attempt to avert the fall of the Liberal government, which had grown divided about their commitment to Russia in a European War. For three days, the Germans responded receptively to these entreaties. Bethmann Hollweg wrote to Falkenhayn that "we must at least respond to the British requests - if and when matters do come to a head, it will be helpful not to be perceived too much as the strong-headed ones". A meeting of Von Below and Grey was set to take place on the 26th.

On the 23rd, Belgrade was surrounded, and the French offered "unconditional support" to Russia following the final day of diplomatic talks in St. Petersburg. This promise of support along with the impending fall of Belgrade jointly prompted the Russians to put the Kiev military district on pre-mobilization footing in an attempt to deter Austrian intervention in the coming invasion of Anatolia. Once again, German military spies correctly assessed that the pre-mobilization footing was not an offensive measure but an attempt at deterrence.

On the 25th, a German spy reported that the past couple days had seen increased rail-way activity throughout both the Polish and Vilno military districts. This prompted an emergency meeting the next day between Bethmann Hollweg, Falkenhayn, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tirpitz, who were fortuitously all in the Berlin area. This time, Bethmann Hollweg and and Falkenhayn both pressed for an immediate general mobilization against Russia. What had changed? It has now been conclusively established that Russia was not mobilizing the Polish or Wilno military districts. The troop movements there were simply a matter of the complex Russian mobilization system, which required troops to be shuffled around many different districts. Several military officials had informed Falkenhayn of this before the meeting.

The best explanation for the much more bellicose stance of the German Government is that, firstly, the Austrian Army would finally be prepared for war in three days, and secondly, the coming fall of Belgrade would allow for an immediate Austrian mobilization in Galicia and even parts of East Prussia, allowing for more German troops to be dedicated to the assault on France. The fact that a vote of no confidence looked like it was about to occur in the British Parliament also helped matters. In short: the Russian troop activity in Polish was more a pretext for a war Germany had already been planning to launch than a genuine casus belli.

As Germany mobilized on the 26th, Russia felt prompted to do the same. On the 27th, believing that a European war was inevitable, they began the invasion of Ottoman Armenia. On the 28th, the British Government narrowly survived the vote of no confidence with a promise to avert war in Europe after securing the support of Labor representatives. It was widely understood to be one of the shortest mandates ever given to a British government by Parliament. The same day, Germany delivered an ultimatum to France which demanded France convince Russia to cease its mobilization against Germany or face a declaration of war. The following day, H.H. Asquith announced that the British Government would defend France in the event of a German attack, prompting another no-confidence vote to be scheduled on August 2nd. An unlikely coalition of conservatives and radicals looked poised to oust Asquith, with the radicals hoping to regain control over their own party and the conservatives looking to take the reins of government in coalition with some moderate liberals in a "government of national unity".

With the invasion of Armenia achieving several rapid successes, Russia began a general mobilization, prompting Austria-Hungary to do the same. On August 1st, the Great War began as Germany declared war on France after its refusal to submit to several ultimatums that would have meant the end of the Entente as an alliance. On the 1st, as his final act as Prime Minister H.H. Asquith declared war on Germany, infuriating many of the radicals in his coalition. He resigned the next day before the no-confidence vote. On the 2nd, Bonar Law was tasked with forming a new government; he quickly found willing partners among the more reasonable Liberals.

Excerpts from the book, The Great Deluge: Europe 1914-1924, Arthur Schlesinger Sr

Published by Harvard University Press © 1953, Boston, The United States

…The historical mythology which places sole guilt for the war on Germany typically proceeds through an examination of the diplomatic manuevering in the July Crisis. It should be insisted that such an analysis will never be sufficient to assign sole "guilt" to Germany for the war, since the war itself was the product of processes that stretched at least decades into the past, and which all of the European powers were willing participants in. Even so, an impartial and just adjudication of the actions of the principal actors in the July Crisis does not reveal any unambiguous verdict on the guilty and the innocent.

The blame for the war is traditionally laid on Bethmann Hollweg and Falkenhayn. As a military man, Falkenhayn was indeed accustomed to military solutions, though he did not have the power to act unilaterally. He required the consent of the Kaiser, and in crucial moments, the Kaiser showed himself to be unwilling to committ to a war unless both Bethmann Hollweg and Falkenhayn presented a unanimous front. For all his bluster, the Kaiser believed a European War to be a last resort, and he was more interested in using the threat of conflict to bolster Germany's position than he was in conflict itself.

This is true of Bethmann Hollweg as well. His fear, and the fear of Germany's entire military establishment, was that the Russian military expansion program would make the German-Austrian coalition unable to fight a two-front war within the next three years, and thus render the nation at a permanent strategic disadvantage. He may have been willing to accept such a scenario if there were assurances of Russia's pacific intentions, or if the Entente alliance itself had not grown significantly in the past three or four years. As it was, however, this was an unacceptable situation.

Nonetheless, at no point prior to the Russian troop movements in Poland on July 25th was Hollweg set upon war. The gamble he made was to isolate Russia in the crisis, not to use it to provoke a war between the great powers. The meeting on the 16th between Falkenhayn and Hollweg did not end in Hollweg promising support for Falkenhayn; much more plausible is the notion that it was simply meant to clear the air between the two men, who were at loggerheads in the previous meetings. The clearest record we do have of Hollweg's intentions is a private entry he wrote on the 12th, which reads "We may need to go to war with Russia…but only if Russia itself wants a war. The crisis will allow us to determine this".

In short, Hollweg aimed to use the crisis to both discern Russian intentions and attempt to foment splits within the Entente. War was a final and last resort if Russian intransigence indicated that they would remain a hostile power after their military expansion was completed. The Russian troop movements on the 25th were treated with quite genuine alarm in the emergency meeting of German military and civilian leaders; this would not be expected if it was viewed merely as a pretext for war. At most, the Germans can be accused of acting over-hastily in this situation by beginning a general mobilization before consulting with the Russians.

None of this is to claim that the fault for the war instead lies with the Russians or the French. The Russians were in a terribly uncomfortable position, on the verge of seeing their presence in the Balkans all but disappear. British waffling understandably led the French to a more uncompromising commitment to the Russians. German refusals to truly engage in British mediation were an indication of the paranoia of its leaders.

The point that must be driven home is that blame for the war cannot be laid at the feet of any of the European Powers alone, because doing so constitutes a failure to consider why the July Crisis was a historical possibility in the first place. Whoever can be proportioned the most blame during July 1914, the much weightier and more vital question still remains: why was European civilization so willing to engage in the suicidal violence of the next half-decade to settle questions of comparative influence in the Balkan backwoods?

 

[Curby]

I feel like the time-line is moving a bit slower than I would like, so I'm going to change the way that I do updates for a bit. Instead of giving a granular blow-by-blow of events, I'll try to cover a certain aspect of the war over a set duration of time in a single post. So, the posts will look like this: "The Military History of the Great War, 1917", or "The British Home Front: 1916-1917". I'll be focused primarily on covering those areas where there are the largest divergences from OTL. I'm also going to dispense, for now, with the authorial device of in-universe texts. The way that the events of 1914-1919 are perceived by the various participants varies a great deal; for now, I want to avoid making readers feel as if they need to triangulate from whatever bias the text might have to get a true picture of events.

I'm also posting a short poll, just to get a sense of what kind of pacing people feel is best. The level of granularity I need to have is something I've struggled with somewhat, and any feedback would be appreciated. I'm also sorry it took so long for this update to come out; for anyone who also has Long Covid, I don't recommend getting re-infected!

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The Military History of the Great War, 1914-1915

The Western Front, 1914

Faced with an enemy which had an overwhelming advantage in raw materials, man-power, and naval might, the German general staff devised the "Schlieffen Plan", hoping to knock France out of the war in the first few months before pivoting to the East. The plan called for an invasion through neutral Belgium to bypass the heavy fortifications in Lorraine. It required the German Army's most well-equipped and thoroughly trained forces to be dedicated to the northern portion of the Western Front. Only a single field army was assigned to the east to hold Russia at bay in East Prussia. The plan informed much of the structure of German mobilization: a German general famously remarked that even if the German Army wished to divert additional armies to the East at the start of the war, it would have been logistically incapable of doing so.

The Schlieffen Plan was doomed to fail. It was a plan designed with 19th, rather than 20th century military technology in mind. It was also a plan which could only emerge from a military-political complex which believed deeply in its own strategic mythologies, in the notion of the decisive offensive which would shatter enemy lines with such force and vigor that the opposing army would be placed on the permanent defensive. Unfortunately, the failure of the Schlieffen Plan did not disabuse the German general staff of such notions.

In retrospect, it is a testament to the tactical brilliance of the German officer and extent of Franco-British incompetence that the offensive still saw German troops occupy many of the resource-rich regions in Northern France and come within 40 kilometers of Paris itself. In August, the German armies seized the Belgian fortress of Liege, occupied Rheims, and foiled the French offensive into Alsace-Lorraine. However, sabotage by Alsatian citizens and Franc-tireur activity made it difficult for the German Army to launch a counter-offensive in the region. On August 25th, Moltke refused the request of Prince Rupprecht to launch an offensive to the south in order to encircle French troops in Lorraine, instead committing additional reserves to the northern armies approaching the river Marne. Three days later, a request for a corps to reinforce the East was only begrudgingly supplied with a single division after it became clear that the Russian Army was still having trouble mobilizing sufficient forces for a sustained assault into East Prussia.

By September 5th, a sizable Franco-British force had emerged to oppose the armies at the Marne. With the front widening with every further advance, a gap had emerged between the German armies in the area between the towns of Chantilly and Meaux. In the "Battle of Oise", a British force attacked this region, slipping behind the German armies and threatening their rear. Moltke threw in his reserves for a counter-attack on the flanks of this advance. Although the counter-attack was inconclusive, it convinced the British commander in the region that they were at risk of encirclement, and the British troops promptly withdrew to their previous positions, giving the German armies time to re-establish communications and close any remaining gaps on the line. Nonetheless, the German Army as a whole was quickly losing its strategic initiative. Attacks on its flanks continued, and the Franco-British concentration of forces swelled further as troops were ferried in from Britain.

The German General staff was paralyzed by indecision. While Falkenhayn wished to mount a direct assault on Paris, Moltke believed that the flanks of the German Armies were not secure enough for such a move. The inadvertant operational pause which this dispute caused allowed the French Armies to the Northwest of the German position to muster their forces and attack just north of the river Oise. A simultaneous assault on Moltke's Southern flank by forces in Lorraine ensured that no reserves were sent to deal with the attack until the main axis of advance was determined.Tthough the attack out of Lorraine was halted at the expense of several German divisions, in the North several French armies broke through the German lines. This time, they did not retreat, and the General staff was forced to order a retreat of the armies to the south toward the river Aisne.

Moltke believed that the Schieffen plan had failed because it had not led to the destruction of the actual French Army. With it becoming clear that a "long war" was now inevitable, he decided on committing the remainder of the offensive power of the German Army to encircling the French Armies to his north. While the rest of the army retreated to the Aisne, he ordered the Third Field Army, thus far the least bruised in the fighting, to launch a counter-offensive around the town of Noyon, with the goal of pushing toward Amiens and creating a pocket of French troops stranded between the German position on the Aisne and the Somme river. It was hoped this would also render suspect the position of any French forces north of the Somme river, forcing a retreat from Belgium and Pas-de-Calais.

The counter-offensive began brilliantly. It started a phase of the war known as the "march to the north" as both armies increasingly shifted forces away from Lorraine and Paris. Moltke mused that "the war might still be won" after resigning himself to its loss only days ago. The French troops were caught off guard by the frontal german assault after several days of advancing largely without organized opposition. Within days, the German forces had captured Noyon, Mondidier, and Roye. The German forces dug-in on the Aisne River inflicted devastating causal-ties on several French counter-attacks from the south. Nonetheless, by the time the Third Army reached Amiens, it was exhausted. More than that, its flanks were exposed to French forces to both its north and south. In the days since the advance started, fresh BEF divisions were diverted to Amiens, and their heroic - and successful - defense of the city was a massive propaganda victory for the entente which helped smooth over tensions between the two nations.

The advance French forces cut off by the German thrust toward Amiens were nonetheless still quite vulnerable. But Moltke, now increasingly paranoid about the potential of encirclement, refused to immediately divert forces from Amiens for an offensive against them, and they largely managed to make their way north toward Passcendale, Ypres, and Givenchy. As a result, when an offensive from the 2nd army did begin to move north from Montdidier toward Albert and eventually Arras, these forces were able to engage in a fighting retreat that slowed down the German Armies and provided crucial time to organize a defense around Arras itself.

Arras was the point at which both armies lost their capacity to conduct offensive operations. Lead elements of the 2nd army had managed to occupy around a quarter of the town, but French reinforcements in the region had prevented them from advancing further. Flanking attacks to the town's north failed to make progress, and the rest of the town was turned into something of a bunker by French troops. Over the course of a week and a half in October, the French, British and German armies jointly suffered around 500,000 causalties in and around the historic city, with the Germans hoping to take the entirety of the town after flanking attacks to the town's north were defeated. The "Razing of Arras" saw much of the baroque town square destroyed by German artillery fire.

In the end, German forces were forced to withdraw from the ruins of Arras due to the pressure of flanking counter-offensives from the French and British. Despite this, the damage done to the French and British armies in the battle ensured that it would take at least a year before the Entente could launch a large offensive in France. By the end of 1914, the Central Powers occupied a line in Northern France running from along the river Aisne, and moving North toward Montdidier, Villiers, Albert, Vimy, Lens and Ypres.

The Eastern Front, 1914

Perhaps the most salient facts about the Eastern Front during the first month and a half of the war was its relative absence of real fighting. This was largely due to the "mobilization fiasco" in Russia. This fiasco was largely fore-seen by Russian generals, who warned that partially mobilizing some miitary districts but not others would likely result in confusion if a general mobilization of Western Military districts was ever called. The Tsar, who had initially hoped to confine the war to a Russian-Ottoman one, rebuffed the advice of his generals. Consequently, many weeks were spent with the Southern districts on a full mobilization footing while the Western ones were either partially or completely non-mobilized. When the call for general mobilization came out, trains intended to be used to transport troops to the West were already being employed to ferry soldiers and supplies to the South. The French plan for an early Russian invasion of East Prussia to divert German troops to the East failed spectacularly, and would have perhaps been fatal for the French war effort were it not for the equally spectacular failure of the Schlieffen plan.

In late September, around 500,000 Russian soldiers had finally coalesced to begin their invasion of East Prussia. The much smaller German force of 135,000 troops at first retreated after a Russian advance on Gumbinnen, but quickly redeployed to a more defensible position and halted the advance. After Ludendorff and Hindenburg arrived, they attempted to lure the Russian Army into several envelopments, but the commander of the 2nd Russian Army, General Samsanov, remained wary of advancing with his rather ill-equipped forces. Hindenburg and Ludendorff embarked on several counter-offensives, and they did manage to push the Russians out of most of East Prussia, but they were unable to inflict anything like a decisive defeat on the much larger and continuously swelling Russian Army, which by the end of 1914 numbered 800,000 to the Germans 150,000 troops. Hindenburg and Ludendorff's repeated requests in for additional troops to launch an offensive to push the remaining Russian forces out of Gumbinnen and other border towns in East Prussia were denied.

Developments further south were similarly ambiguous. While the fall of Belgrade was an unambiguous victory for the Central Powers, it was unclear who, if anyone, had won the Galician campaign. While the Russians had not managed to take Lviv, the infamously poorly planned counter-attacks of the Austrian General Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf did succeed in decimating at least a third of the Austrian forces in the East. The Russians suffered similar losses, but had greater ease in replenishing them, as well as an army which wasn't riven by the same ethnic tensions as the Hapsburgs'.

The Western Front, 1915

At the beginning of 1915, the German general staff had a decision to make: to renew the offensive in the West, or strike East in the hope of inflicting a blow devastating enough to Russia to force them out of the war? Unsurprisingly, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who controlled the armies in the east, advocated for the transfer of at least six corps from the West for a massive offensive to drive the Russians out of East Prussia and then Congress Poland. Bethmann Hollweg supported the two commanders in this plan, but there were also important figures aligned with the clique around Falkenhayn who advocated for a decisive blow in the West, such as Tirpitz, who was invested in the strategy of commerce raiding with Britain, and eventually the Kaiser himself, who had been stung by British entry into the war.

In the end, Falkenhayn's clique won the struggle. The failure of the Russian armies to take Lviv and the fall of Belgrade conspired to weaken Bethmann Hollweg's warnings about the instability of Austria-Hungary. Ludendorff and Hindenburg's inability to drive the Russians completely out of the Reich's borders harmed their credibility. And the tantalizing closeness to victory in the West during the initial months of the War led many in the OHL to believe that one more offensive would break the back of the French Army and force Britain into a negotiated peace.

Thus in early April, the Germans began the First Battle of the Somme. Instead of directly assaulting Amiens, fourteen German divisions in the salient running from outside the city South to Montdidier attacked directly west after bombarding Allied troops with the first use of poisoned gas in the war. Once again, the offensive was initially spectacularly successful. Amiens was out-flanked, and then captured on April 11th. German armies rushed into the breakthrough, and France began scrambling to evacuate troops from north of Somme for a second defense of Paris. The penultimate target of the offensive was the town of Abbeville, just north of the Somme.

The battle of Abbeville, referred by the British simply as the "miracle of Abbeville", saw the German offensive halted by the extensive fortification network that had been built up around the city. The futile German assault in this area led to the exhaustion of the German divisions participating in the offensive. These divisions may have prevented the wild success of the coming British counter-offensive to the south if it had not lost around a third of its officers and artillery pieces. As it was, the British counter-offensive forced a general retreat of the German divisions in the area. After Amiens was recaptured, the French joined in the counter-offensive, and forced the demoralized German troops out of their initial positions in Montdidier and Albert, and back toward Noyon and Ham.

The offensive was a disaster. It was one of the first battles which had a higher proportion of German causalties than Entente ones. It also saw the German Army lose ground, and though the position it now held was somewhat more defensible, its defeat in the First Battle of the Somme nonetheless demonstrated that there would be no easy victory in the west. Perhaps most importantly, it led to a loss of face for Falkenhayn, which would have large consequences for later German strategy in the war. Though he was not demoted from his position at the head of the OHL, it was now Hindenburg and Ludendorff who had the ear of the Kaiser. Their "eastern strategy" would soon become unofficial German policy.

On the Western Front, the remainder of 1915 would see several failed Entente offensives in the north, around Ypres, and the south, near the Aisne. As German high command became convinced that the Entente was unable to break through the fortified German lines, more and more troops were committed to the east for a massive, Austro-German-Bulgarian offensive meant to knock the Russians out of the war. Reports received from both Britain and France about the massing of troops in Prussia and Galicia convinced them of the need to launch a more concerted and focused offensive early in 1916 to force Germany to bring forces back to the west.

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Quick note: I will cover the Eastern Front in 1915 in the next post!

 

[Curby]

The Military History of the Great War, 1915

The Eastern Front

The defeats which Russia suffered in 1915 at the hands of Austrian, German, and Bulgarian forces demonstrated beyond doubt that the hopes of the French political establishment - that Russian rearnament following the Russo-Japanese war would ensure French security - were a matter more of fantasy than military insight. A lack of communication between different armies, the dearth of competent generals, and, above all, a lack of artillery, particularly heavy guns, all conspired to render numerically superior Russian forces vulnerable to Austro-German assaults.

The early fall of Belgrade also allowed the Central Powers to concentrate their forces in Galicia and East Prussia. Additionally, the Russian's premature mobilization against the Ottomans meant a disproportionate share of their troops were still positioned there; the early successes against the Turks had prompted the Russians to expand the offensive further into Anatolia, which, while having some successes, likely did not make a significant strategic contribution to the entente war effort.

Even more importantly, after February the Bulgarians begin sending additional troops to northern Galicia to reinforce the Austrian ones. Initially, Bulgaria had been wary of sending its troops to fight in foreign lands. Many of its soldiers were exhausted after fighting three wars in two years, and there was little desire among the broader population for a fight with Russia. A meeting with Austrian and German leaders, however, quickly impressed upon the Bulgarian Prime Minister Vasil Radoslavov that there would be grave consequences in the post-war period for Bulgaria if it refused to participate in the war effort.

Fearing diplomatic isolation, the Bulgarians reluctantly agreed to a deal that allowed them to drawdown the number of men in their army while sending the professional, hardened core to Galicia. Along with the German troops steadily streaming into the region, these soldiers would serve as a vital bracing for the more fragile and disjointed Austro-Hngarian forces. This also increased the sense of urgency among the Entente powers to bring Italy, Romania, Greece, or some combination of these nations into the war; in 1915, they would only have success with Italy.

Before the disaster of the First Battle of the Somme, it was still largely Falkenhayn who dictated German War policy. Hindenburg thus received only an additional three corps, ostensibly to hold the line against the Russians in East Prussia. Nonetheless, over the first four months of 1914, he managed to lure the Russians in East Prussia into a series of pitched battles around Konigsberg, Gumbinnen, and Tannenberg that eventually forced the weakened 1st and 2nd armies to evacuate East Prussia. This greatly increased the reputation of Hindenburg and Ludendorff back in Berlin, and when Falkenhayn's gambit in the west failed, Bethmann Hollweg managed to convince the Kaiser to grant the Junker and his hothead adjutant the reserves that they were requesting for a decisive blow against Russia.

The need for an offensive to relieve the Austrians had increased in the wake of a renewed Russian offensive in Galicia. Russian forces had arrived outside Lemberg (Lviv) once again in April, and it was only the arrival of several Bulgarian divisions that had prevented the fall of the city. Further east, the Russians continued to push into Erzerum, and in May, the Italians joined the war, forcing Austria to send reserves to the Alpine border with Italy.

The Hindenburg-Ludendorff plan called for not one, but two offensives. The first would occur out of the area around Gumbinnen toward the city of Kovno, and destroy what remained of the 1st and 2nd Russian Armies which had originally invaded East Prussia. With their eastern flank secured, they would wait at least three weeks to re-organize their forces before striking south, toward the city of Przasnysz. A joint Austro-German-Bulgarian force would strike simultaneously out of Lviv, aiming for Lublin. After both Lublin and Przasnysz were secured, both fronts would converge on Siedlce, a small city east of Warsaw, encircling the Russian forces that remained in Poland in a massive double envelopment.

The first part of the offensive was slated to begin on July 15th. It called for the commitment of at least seventeen additional German divisions to the east, with at least ten of these divisions coming from those previously stationed on the Western Front, and hence schooled in assault and breakthrough tactics. The losses at the Battle of the Somme and the need to build up munitions stockpiles post-poned the first stage of the offensive for around a month; it began in earnest on August 17th.

In the Battle of the Masurian Lakes, the Germans secured their first unalloyed victory since last August. Although the 1st and 2nd armies were not encircled, superior german fire-power destroyed their capacity to operate as effective fighting formations after the conclusion of the offensive. The Russians lost around 145,000 killed, wounded, and captured; the Germans, a bit under 25,000. They also managed to not only advance to Kovno proper, but also to seize the city and its crucial railway junction, which would make any Russian counter-offensive in the area difficult to supply and allow the Germans a spring-board to Vilna for future offensives.

The second phase of the plan was slated to commence less than a month after the first concluded. This meant that it should have begun around October 12th. Difficulties with fitting German rolling stock to Russian rail gauges, however, prevented a speedy redeployment of divisions, and entente offensives around Ypres and the Aisne prevented the withdrawal of a number of divisions slated to be transferred from the west. Nonetheless, by November the offensive was ready to proceed. On November 3rd, the last phase of the offensive begun.

Today, the "Great Winter Offensive", or, in Russian, the "The Catastrophe of 15'", is considered one of those rare military operations which constitutes an exception to the time-honored rule that "no plan survives contact with the enemy". The advance to Lublin and Przasnysz by each flank of the offensive proceeded without issue, and within a week and a half each city had fallen to a mixture of German, Austrian, and Bulgarian troops. Panic within the Russian headquarters in Warsaw temporarily paralyzed the Russian armies in the area. It is likely that a short march straight on Warsaw at this point would have encircled almost the entirety of the Russian Army in Poland. As it was, the decision to dive further East, toward Siedlce, actually brought the Russians precious time to organize a withdrawal of a good number of their forces in the region.

In real terms, of course, the offensive constituted an unmitigated disaster for Russia. Over 625,000 Russian troops were captured. Nearly 1.3 million were killed or wounded. The troops that did escape from Congress Poland still constituted a coherent fighting force, but they would likely be unable to resist an offensive of similar scale. Perhaps most importantly, the need to replenish the losses at the front would require either drafting more urban workers into the army and threatening the productivity of the burgeoning war industries, or doing the same with the peasantry and imperiling local food supplies.

Despite the halo of invincibility that the victory afforded to Ludendorff and Hindenburg, in retrospect it is unclear that this second phase of the offensive constituted a real improvement in Germany's strategic position. Over 650,000 Austrian and 350,000 German soldiers had been killed or wounded in the offensive. An immense amount of German war materiel had been expended, and many strategic stockpiles were now empty. A large Entente offensive in the west likely would have broken the German lines at this point, but Britain and France at the time still felt that they needed to marshal their forces for a battle in 1916, and the offensives that did occur around Ypres and Passchendaele were smaller in scope, which gave the Germans time to move reserves into the areas.

Nonetheless, by the end of 1915, the situation on the Western Front was growing increasingly grim as Allied numerical and industrial superiority grew by the day. The next year, the hammer would fall.

 

[Curby]

The Central Powers at War: Politics and Society, 1914

Germany

Excerpts from Max Horkheimer, The Days Recounted: 1912-1919 (Leipzig-Dresden Collective, 1932)

It is difficult for the historian to write honestly of the heady days of 1914, substantially more difficult than it is to ask him to write of 1789 or 1848; for though the motivations of the participants in the events of 1914 are more intelligible to us than those of centuries past, the events themselves are clouded in such a thick and variegated crust of historical mythology that piercing through it inevitably unveils something far too weighed down with the verdict of the present and the weight of the past to constitute anything like the bare and unadorned matter of reality.

The days of 1914 were the times of Illusion and times of conviction. The Spirit of 1914 bound the nation together in a new and organic social compact; and the Spirit of 1914 was a bad solidarity, a wholly ideological unity engineered by the state and by imperialist rivalry rather than genuine class consciousness, national community, or the reciprocal recognition of human dignity (take your pick). This was the time when the working class temporarily found itself reconciled with the national mission of Germany, or, alternatively, the time when the representatives of the German working class betrayed their historic mission of proletarian internationalism.

Perhaps one could adjudicate more easily between the competing myths and the historical accretions piled atop them were it not for the fact that the myths were not imposed upon the past from a distant future but emerged from the self-understandings of the historical actors themselves. 1914 was a time when myth irrupted into and consumed reality. We may inquire more or less into the particular material conditions which gave rise to the myth, which allowed it to be mobilized and exert a decisive influence on the course of history. We may inquire, too, into the extent to which the Zabern affair had already conditioned a large number of Germans to awaken from this myth once it was shattered by the hard glare of industrial war-fare. But in a final sense, it is man's fatal susceptibility to myth which made the days of 1914 possible.

Excerpts from Fritz Stern, The Great War: A New History (University of Berlin Press, 1955)

In 1914, the German war effort had broad but not unanimous support among the Reich's population. For Prussian conservatives and the haute bourgeousie, there was little question of supporting the war. More liberal elements in Germany felt at least some sense of patriotism in the "rechtstaat", and wished to defend it from Russian despotism in the east and British imperialism in the west. Even the leaders of the worker's movement in the SPD hoped that the "Spirit of 1914" would be translated in the post-war era into a wave of social reforms that would entrench social democracy in the German state.

In the month or so leading up to the declaration of war, fear of a Tsarist invasion of the east did much to dissolve class and ethnic tensions between Germans. The central casus belli of the Central Powers, the claim that Russia had begun a mobilization in Poland, was accepted without much question. The Committee for the Protection of National Minorities, which would serve throughout the war as a bell-wether of sorts for progressive opinion in Germany, endorsed any coming war effort the same day that German mobilization was declared.

Both Bethmann Hollweg and the German military attempted to mobilize the broadest front of popular opinion possible in favor of the war. This effort was complicated by the "Shweitzer affair" of August 3rd, when news broke in several Munich papers of the death of the the Alsatian Lutheran Minister and doctor Albert Shweitzer, who was shot in a motor-car after the driver refused to pull over. Inebriated students in the town of Landau had created a series of make-shift roadblocks with the intention of searching for a rumored "French motorcade" carrying gold and arms to aid Russia in its war effort. The relatively modest coterie of vehicles accompanying Schweitzer's was not an escort of any sort, but simply an ad hoc assortment of those academics, judges, and local dignitaries who could afford passage out of an area that many expected to be a war zone in the coming weeks. Their decision to travel together had been precipitated by rumours of cars being waylaid by rural villagers, but the full details of the "French motorcade" conspiracy do not appear to have been known to them (otherwise, they may have guessed that traveling in such a group would only increase the likelihood of an altercation).

It has been considered something of a minor miracle that the story was published at all, given the rather harsh censorship regime that existed throughout much of the war. Several circumstances conspired together to make this possible. Firstly, the censorship regime in Bavaria was always relatively more liberal than that in Prussia, particularly in the eastern districts. Secondly, the machinery of war-time censorship was not fully in place. Thirdly, the details of the story itself superficially appeared to militate against Alsatian regionalism: the primary figure in the case, Albert Schweitzer, spoke a German dialect, was a protestant pastor, and was not politically active. Ironically, it was also these facts which rendered Schweitzer such a useful figure to rally around for the Alsatians and those sympathetic to their plight.

Perhaps most importantly, the military itself was trying to wind down the number of road-side attacks. There is some evidence that the rumour of a French motor-cade was intentionally dispersed by the military to encourage patriotic sentiments, but that the degree of disturbance it caused led to the desire to suppress it. If this is so, the publication of the story was successful: the number of road-side shootings and attempted seizures of motor vehicles decreased considerably over the next few days before completely subsiding.

The story had such an immediate and electrifying event that newspapers which were proscribed from publishing it nonetheless dropped hints about a "Bavarian affair" in next days papers', prompting a buy-up of the small circulation of the southern papers in the northern cities of the reich. The government immediately feared a "repeat of Zabern" , particularly after the committee on national minorities announced a call for a "thorough and complete investigation of the vile murderers of Dr. Schweitzer". Thus far, the strategy of Bethmann Hollweg's government had been to reach out to the trade unions and catholic organizations while suppressing the national minorities in the west and east; the announcement of the SDP that it sympathized with the calls for investigation drew this strategy into question.

In the SDP itself, the majority of the party's members were prepared to vote for war credits, but many in the organization's center also hoped to use the issue of national minorities to extract additional concessions from Bethmann Hollweg. On August 3rd, only 19 delegates voted against the war in an internal meeting. One of these, however, was Hugo Haase, a co-chairs of the party. On the 4th, the day when the government was scheduled to vote for war credits, Haase called for another meeting of the party, forcing a delay of the war credits vote. Haase and a number of newly sympathetic delegates in the center of the party called for the party to only support the war credits vote if "verbal guarantees" were publicly made by Bethmann Hollweg of "political and social reforms". The motion narrowly failed. Shortly thereafter, Haase himself was forced out of a leadership role, which was now captured by a right-wing clique around Ebert and Scheidemann which endorsed war credits "without conditions". Ebert and Scheidemann's decision to align themselves unreservedly with the war would have important consequences for the social-democratic movement...

The next day, voting began on war credits. The social-democratic members of the Reichstag voted 71-16 to approve the war credits. Of note here is the large bloc of 23 members who did not vote at all. Composed overwhelmingly of delegates from the party's revisionist Marxist reformist center, they believed in the cause of the war but did not believe in endorsing war credits until the Kaiser's government made a commitment to national reform. Later that day, Hugo Haase gave a speech imploring "Social democrats of every stripe" to take up arms to defend the fatherland from Russian invasion.

With the left's support secured, Bethmann Hollweg now set his foot down on the minority question. After announcing that a state police investigation would commence into the killing of Schweitzer, orders were issued to military district commanders in charge of censorship to institute a strict press embargo on any news that could incite "regionalist sentiments". Public gatherings and memorials for Shweitzer were carefully monitored, and over the next few weeks, a great many Alsatian citizens suspected of conspiring against the state were arrested and detained by military courts. The Committee for National Minorities was forced to conduct its meetings under the shadow of a military inspector.

The victories of August and the mania that swept the nation under general mobilization did much to at least temporarily calm both ethnic and class resentments. A wave of volunteerism demonstrated that there was quite genuine enthusiasm for the war effort among traditionally social-democratic constituents. If a traditional opinion poll was possible at the time, it is unclear that Ebert's line would have been markedly less popular than Haase's. Among the liberal bourgeoisie, there is little evidence that the Schweitzer Affair reduced in any real measure the amount of enthusiasm for war. In short, even if "The Spirit of '14" was something of a myth, arising more out of the fantasies of wounded middle-class melancholia than genuine historical scholarship, there is substantial truth to the notion that the initial months of the war saw a temporary social truce in the midst of a felt need for collective self-defense.

 

[Curby]

British Politics and Strategy, 1914-1915

Asquith, the historical verdict goes, was a man who would have made and did in fact make a perfectly respectable peace-time prime minister, but whose nerves and tendency to delegate rather than bear responsibility rendered him unfit for war-time leadership. Whatever the degree of fairness or malignancy in this judgement, it is true that Asquith failed to halt the slow implosion of the Liberal party over the "Russia issue".

The radical ministers, clustered around the persons of John Simon, John Burns, Richard Haldane, and John Morley, may have been willing under certain circumstances to participate in a European war. A nakedly aggressive policy of German eastern imperialism or a clear signal from Austria-Hungary that it intended to precipitate a European war may have convinced the radicals that Tsarist Russia was indeed a lesser evil to imperial Germany. However, the Second Balkan War and the subsequent behavior of Serbia during the Albanian crisis awoke in the radicals that traditional sense of British Liberal moralism which led to the fiasco of the Crimean War and undergirded all elite criticism of British Imperial projects and interventionism. The Romanian affair only compounded matters, nearly leding to the resignation of Burns and Morley from the government. However, the breaking point was Russia's attempt to leverage the threat of Franco-British intervention against the Central Powers to wage a localized war against the Ottomans. This stirred up the old fear of a Russian naval presence in the Mediterranean, and all of a sudden the buried ghosts of the 19th century emerged seemingly unperturbed by their half-decade slumber.

In the terms of Parliamentary power politics, the radicals were playing a losing hand. They could not on the best of days muster more than half the party to the anti-war cause; fomenting a split was sure to be viewed negatively by the institutionalist centre of the party and its power-brokers. More concretely, the only real allies the radicals had in the event of a split were in the labor party and the pro-home rule deputies from Ireland; as these were not sufficient to secure a Parliamentary majority, a radical revolt would inevitably lead to some sort of coalitional government from which they were excluded.

What, then, was the purpose of the revolt? While it is tempting to understand the revolt of the radicals as a matter of principle rather than politics, it is clear in retrospect that the true mind behind it, Sir Richard Haldane, had a lucid long-term political strategy in mind. The radicals reasoned that, given the amount of dissension which had already roiled the cabinet, Asquith was not a candidate that would lead a war-time cabinet for any length of time. He would be replaced by a figure with a clearer record of support for war; such a figure would attempt to side-line the radicals, and, if they governed in coalition with the conservatives, they would be able to do so.

The radicals' reasoned that their decision was not whether to sacrifice principle on the altar of party unity, but whether to expend their remaining political capital to support a failing government or to go unabashedly into the opposition, with all the advantages and opportunities for moral opprobrium and denunciation which that offered. By going into the opposition, the radicals' hoped to become the "conscience of the party", to seize the mantle of leadership when it inevitably presented itself, and to reforge Asquith's coalition once the mistakes of the party's right had been made manifest.

The pivotal figure in the new coalition government was David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer under Asquith. Widely considered to hail from the liberal wing of the party, his reputation for even-handedness during the July Crisis and Asquith's increasing delegation of executive responsibilities saw him take on much of the actual day-to-day business of running government. His decision to align with the pro-war wing of the Liberals enraged the radicals, who treated it as an act of supreme political opportunism, though the recollections of some of the participants in the cabinet meetings of July attest that Lloyd George felt moved by a sense of duty and honor to come to the defense of Britain's allies.

When the prospect of war grew more likely in late July, Lloyd George and a number of sympathetic ministers from the Asquith government held informal talks with Bonar Law and the conservatives. Bonar Law, in private conversation a modest and self-effacing individual, initially suggested that Lloyd George head the new government. It was worried that such a move would strike too much of a last-minute palace coup, however, and the amount of support each party could realistically provide to the new government in parliament militated in favor of a conservative prime minister. Regardless, the new government would be a truly coalitional one.

Lloyd George stayed on as the chancellor of the exchequer, providing the impression of continuity and conservative graciousness to the general public. Winston Churchill, one of the most vocal of the pro-war liberals, was permitted to remain as the First Lord of the Admiralty. Arthur Balfour, the previous conservative Prime Minister, became the new home secretary, while his colleague Bonar Law became the Prime Minister and de facto co-leader of the government along with Lloyd George.

The matters of the war secretary and secretary of foreign affairs were most contentious. H.H. Asquith had previously served as both war minister and prime minister; the desire to create the broadest government possible had led Lloyd George and Bonar Law to offer him the opportunity to stay on as the war minister. Asquith, however, deeply despondent at the time from the failure of his government, refused the position, instead recommending Herbert Kitchener, a national war hero and Consul-General of Egypt. The non-partisan nature of this recommendation struck a chord in Westminster; Lloyd George and Bonar Law set aside their skepticism of the old officer and invited him to participate in government.

The Foreign ministry presented the largest problem. Few individuals could match the knowledge and expertise of Edward Grey, and even fewer were willing to take over the foreign ministry at a time of international crisis. Nonetheless, the July crisis had seriously harmed the man's reputation by associating him with the waffling, indecisive policy of the Asquith government. Several prominent conservatives felt that, had he taken a stronger line in defense of the entente, Germany would not have begun a general mobilization against Russia with such reckless haste.

In the end, Bonar Law was able to mobilize discontent with Grey to bring on Lord Cuzson of Kendleston, an ardent conservative and expert in Central and Near Asia, as a minister without portfolio and eminence grise on British foreign policy, limiting Grey's control over the foreign policy ministry. He was also able to secure the appointment of archconservative Austen Chamberlin as the new Secretary of State for India. In return, Edward Grey remained as the Foreign Minister, and David Lloyd George was able to have Lord Milner, a close ally of his, appointed as a second minister without portfolio.

The actual business of coalition government was complicated by the archaic practices of British cabinet government. A great deal of Lloyd George's power as chancellor of the exchequer had derived from the tight monetary constraints placed on the budget of different cabinet heads and the chancellor's role in enforcing those constraints; with the rush of money coming into the British government through credit and the disorder of the first months of coalition government, effective control of the country soon flowed outward from the principal figures associated with the new government to the lesser known heads of different departments.

This was not helped by the traditional practice of cabinet meetings, which called for the attendance of the entirety of the cabinet in a single room. A great deal of the time of such early meetings were taken up with interdepartmental rivalries, bureaucratic matters, and bookkeeping. To correct this, Lloyd George and Bonar Law started informally convening a "war council" composed of themselves, Herbert Kitchener, Lord Curzon, and Lord Milner, with the irregular participation of Winston Churchill, Austen Chamberlain, and Lord Balfour. The practice of the war council was finalized later in 1915 with a distinction drawn between "permanent", "invited", and "standing" members, with only a three quarters majority of the first required for the council to be considered in session.

The primary questions confronting the war council at the beginning of 1915 concerned the allocation of British national resources and the distribution of British military power. Along the first axis, the ministers were divided between the traditionalists, who wished to see Britain play a primarily financial role, funding its allies, coordinating their strategy, and depriving the Central Powers of trade, and the continentalists, who were committed to an expansion of the British Army into an offensive fighting-force. The continentalist position would require more radical changes to British domestic policy: a thorough-going army expansion would likely require a draft, and if Britain was to continue providing significant funds to its allies along with equipping its enlarged army, an increase in the income tax and a broadening in its fairly narrow base (before the war, around 2% of the population) would be required.

The second axis was divided by the easterners and westerners. The former advocated for operations against the Ottoman Empire. They were composed of a motley crew of Central Asian experts from the high days of Russophobia who worried that the Ottoman Sultan might incite a revolt among the Muslim population of British India, Russophilic conservatives who hoped that seizing the Dardenelle straits would allow Britain to more easily route supplies to the eastern front, and liberals skeptical of sending more men to die in the western meatgrinder. The westerners believed that the Ottoman theatre was a distraction, and advocated instead for a defensive strategy of reinforcing the lines in the west until Britain could complete an expansion of its army to allow for renewed offensives in 1916.

The war council spun off a number of "committees", typically co-chaired by a single member of the war council in concert with a minister from outside the council. These committees attempted to address pressing issues of policy that the war council felt it did not have sufficient information to resolve, and in large part determined British war strategy in 1915. An eastern and continentalist strategy was decided upon, perhaps the worst nightmare of the fragile Ottoman Empire, which was already reeling from the Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia. With the consensus still not present for a full conscription of single males, Parliament passed a bill heavily incentivizing young, single men to join the army by raising the pay of soldiers and offering anyone who enlisted in the next year "Early buyer" benefits that would allow them to serve significantly less time in the event of a future draft.

The "Dardanelles Committee", eventually renamed the "Turkish Committee", originally pushed for an attack on the straits of Dardanelles to open up another supply route to Russia. Despite the insistence of Winston Churchill on the viability of an assault on the Gallipoli peninsula, Bonar Law, a cautious man, repeatedly rejected the plans for a Dardanelle campaign. Instead, after much internal diplomacy and negotiation, a more modest plan was drafted, calling for the landing of British troops behind the 150,000 man strong Yildirim Army Group in the Sinai Peninsula. As a sop to the charismatic but intemperate Churchill, he was given control over the details of the operation in return for consenting to drop the matter of the Gallipoli Campaign for the remainder of the year.

The new offensive would see 85,000 British troops land in Gaza over the first two weeks of August and advance on Ottoman positions in the Sinai peninsula. The Ottoman soldiers were almost immediately trapped between the freshly landed troops and the advancing soldiers in the south of Britain's Egypt expeditionary force. With no means of re-supply, a breakout attempt was made on August 19th, only to see 8,000 Turkish troops slaughtered by British machine guns in the mostly flat, desert terrain. Around 25,000 did manage to make it through the British lines, which were not sufficient to cover the entire area, but around 70,000 Turkish troops were captured, with the Yildirim Army broken as an effective fighting force. Over the next month and a half, the British Army advanced up the Levant without much effective opposition, only pausing once they reached Aleppo, which had been reinforced by a hastily raised Turkish army.

This was a truly spectacular victory, one of the first of its kind in the British Army. It quickly vaulted Churchill into the position of national hero, despite the fact that the operation itself was far from his first choice, with its basic strategic logic designed more by the British Army than Churchill himself. It also had the effect of discrediting Kitchener, who had remained indecisive about the notion of an attack further south; the success of an operation so close to "Kitchener's domain" without the officer's actual participation led some in the British government to doubt the man's indispensability, despite his populararity amongst the general public.

The arrival of Ottoman reinforcements in Aleppo and the blows to Russia in the east prompted the British government to reassess its policy. While there was a broad consensus that a formal draft had to be implemented, Churchill and a number of other easterners wished to aid Russia through opening the supply corridor in the black sea region with a renewal of the Dardanelles plan, now greatly bolstered by the aura of invincibility surrounding Churchill himself. Unfortunately for the young sea admiral, the basic contours of the war had changed; despite the catastrophic battle-field losses, Russia's munitions industries were beginning to come alive, rendering the need to open a second avenue of supply less urgent. In the wake of the Polish campaign, the Russian government believed that its most pressing need was time to recruit the man-power and create the defensive works needed to prevent future German offensives; the only sure means of buying such time was a Franco-British offensive that would force the Germans to transfer troops to the west. With the strategic rationale for the Dardanelles campaign thus undercut, Churchill found himself slowly being iced out decisions right after the moment of his greatest triumph, a slight that he would not soon forget...

 

[Curby]

William Jennings Bryan's Address to Congress, August 5th, 1914.

Distinguished Speaker Clark, Vice President Wilson, Senators, Congressmen,

I must apologize for addressing you with notes in hand. Perhaps I will one day have the opportunity to speak to you directly, from my own sense of conscience, and yet I can assure you that the words I will speak today are completely in accord with my own feelings, and the contrivance of these notes exists solely as an aid to my imperfect memory. I am sure all of you are familiar with that feeling that comes when addressing a matter infinitely more solemn and important than oneself; in such moments, one is bound to speak only those propositions which are the product of careful deliberation, and in these cases, the drafting of a speech is simply a measure to keep a man fully honest to his own thoughts. I ask simply for your indulgence and consideration.

Three days ago, we became aware of the descent of European civilization into war. I have consulted with generals, with businessmen, with ambassadors and diplomats from all of the warring powers. I have been told that this war will unleash horrors of which this world has been never acquainted, that it will reverse the progress of European culture and learning, that it may even be a prelude to a new and frightful wave of global barbarism.

Over the past year, this administration has sought to render the services of this nation for the cause of global peace. We have been mocked for our naivety and chided for our earnestness. Our success has been marginal, and our failures legion. In a final sense, there can be no excuse for these failings: the great imperial powers of Europe may have been deaf and blind to our pleas and gestures, but the bloodshed which will shortly ensue will torment me with the possibility that something more may have been done to avert this catastrophe.

Yet the sting on my conscience will not prevent this government from forthrightly addressing the reality of our situation. The nations of Europe have chosen the sword over the ploughshare and the pointed rifle over the open hand. We may be tempted into sympathy with one nation over another, to wage in our own minds the momentous struggle that now engulfs Europe. We may be tempted, too, into a position of neutrality and distance, to say: "America will leave this old and broken world alone, and stand apart!".

To the man who has either of these urges, I say: resist temptation. We must be neutral, but we cannot tear ourselves from the bonds of human brotherhood. We must condemn the rush to war, but also remain in eternal sympathy with the human beings who are forced to wage it. We must condemn the decisions of the leaders who plunged Europe into a conflagration, while reminding ourselves that enmity and hatred are as poisonous to the righteous victim as they are to the callous offender. The deaths of millions shall hang on the consciences of those who have caused this war; they, too, shall number among its victims.

I have spent many nights thinking earnestly of the role of this great nation in the coming conflict. I have read and consulted the opinions of those who urge this nation to participate in the conflict, to "test its mettle" and "earn a place in the world". These ideas have become fashionable and current; they are, in a sense, the currency of international politics. And yet I urge the men assembled here to consider their frightful consequences: that a nation can only claim moral leadership in the world by sending its youth to die in a conflict in which it has no essential stake. It is my duty as a Christian to denounce the Darwinist myth that the exercise of violence can ever be justified by the imperialist's desire for power and glory or the militarist's drive to substitute the sanctity of home and peaceful toil with the false allure of battle. I will not send Americans to die for these idle fantasies.

Neither will this American nation stand aloof and apart from the coming conflict. We will stand as that city upon a hill, with all eyes upon us: we will strive to persuade by example that peace may bring a harvest richer and more bounteous than war. We will welcome all who wish to join us, and bear no enmity or hatred for those who take longer than others. We will insist and ensure, by force if necessary, that war will not be allowed to fray the bonds of commerce and trade, and that the blinkered priorities of generals and politicians will not be permitted to trample upon the manifold needs of the suffering masses.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in right as God gives us to see it, we shall carry on the task of our civilization. We shall do so tirelessly, we shall do so even it must be done alone, toiling in the dark, with naught but the burning of the mid-night oil to comfort us - for we know that one day, we will be joined by the broad throng of humanity, and we will at last venture forth into those broad sunlit uplands in which grace and brotherhood reigns eternal...

 

[Curby]

The Sleeping Giant: American Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1914-1915

America may not have been a participant in the Great War, but it was also hardly a nation at rest. Above all, America was not at nation at peace with itself. Over the war's duration, the internal fissures in American society burst to the surface; President Bryan was either a man haplessly forced to confront the demons of the 20th century or a demagogue who had called them forth for his own purposes. The nation either stood at risk of losing its position of power and influence in the world by virtue of Bryan's terminal weakness, or it was about to lose its democratic traditions as shadowy interests compelled it to join the descent into rank darwinist blood-letting.

In the American cultural imaginary, the nation was destined to be a peaceful one: the bourgeois virtues of bourgeois mass democracy were cultivated on the family farm and the market square, in the thrum of commerce and the steady toil of work. War, when it came, was to be waged in defense of the homeland and with a spirit of comradeship and sacrifice. It was to serve a national purpose beyond the drive for acquisition or the pursuit of glory. This, at least, was the line of Bryan, and the failure of Bryan's enemies to ever decisively shatter Bryan's hold on the nation must be attributed in part to their failure to fully channel and embody America's own national mythology.

Although America did not enter 1914 with anxieties of war and civilizational suicide, these thoughts haunted Bryan. The stresses of Bryan's first years in office had led him to turn increasingly to his evangelical faith. He foresaw a cataclysmic war that would engulf Europe, and his speeches at the out-set of the Albanian crisis warning of this potentiality led many of his supporters to see him as a prophet as well as an ordinary politician. The high melodrama of his oratory had a deeply polarizing effect on the national mood: one either bought the diagnosis along with the prescription or rejected them both as mere demagoguery. Bryan was either a visionary or a crackpot; he could not be both.

The beginning of 1914 saw several scandals rock the Bryan administration. Firstly, the roll-out of the Unemployment and Old Age Relief Act was something of a disaster. The Bryan administration had intentionally avoided the prospect of a national identification system, fearing that the government intrusion into private life such a move would represent might become a pretext for tyranny in the hands of a Republican president. Consequently, a great many individuals had trouble collecting the benefits that were assigned to them, while others were able to collect the same benefits many times in a single week. The bureaucratic imbroglio that resulted paralyzed the Department of Labor, which was tasked with dispensing the benefits.

Eventually, Bryan was forced to quickly pass an additional law creating a national ID system, with each citizen assigned a "UPN", or "Unemployment-Pension Number", that they needed to present in order to collect benefits. Despite the initial confusion, the program itself was enormously popular, with one prominent Democratic newspaper quipping that "We would rather a man who wishes to help us but has some problems figuring out how to lend a hand then one determined to ignore our plight altogether". As the system for dispensing the benefits was slowly stream-lined, elderly poverty began to drastically decline. The economic stimulus provided by increased spending on food and housing tightened the labor market, driving up wages and helping Bryan solidify his support among Northern laborers.

The second scandal involved the "Mexican issue". Here, Bryan really had stuck his foot in it by funding Pancho Villa against the counsel of many of his advisors. When war broke out between the forces of Villa and Zapatista and the constitutionalists, Bryan eventually agreed to withdraw funding from Villa, leading to a bloody civil war that the administration felt itself unable to resolve. The damage to American business interests in the area was still negligible in in 1914, but there were growing reports suggesting that the fiasco in Mexico was due to mismanagement from Bryan himself.

Finally, there was the controversy attending Bryan's attempted resolution of the Colorado Coalfield War. After sending federal troops to the area, Bryan tasked the head of the Department of Labor, William B. Wilson, with drafting an agreement between the unions and the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Rockefeller rebuffed the overtures of the miner's unions and the department of labor, leading Bryan to call for "emergency arbitration" to enforce a somewhat milder version of the agreement. Rockefeller sued, bringing the case to the Supreme Court, which ruled that Bryan's attempt to impose a "unilateral agreement" between the miners' and Colorado Fuel and Iron constituted a "unconstitutional infringement on property rights". In the coming months, there were several attempts by Bryan's administration to forward legislation to Congress that would circumvent the courts' ruling, but it was stalled by Congressional Leadership out of fears that the legislation itself would be struck down by the courts.

In any event, the outbreak of war in Europe would soon refocus the nation's attention away from all three scandals. Three days after the outbreak of the European war, William Jennings Bryan addressed Congress, giving one of the most famous political speeches in American history. The last paragraph of this speech, in which Bryan suggested that America would ensure free commerce "by force, if necessary" raised anxieties in the new British cabinet about an potential American attempt to interfere with the planned British blockade. Even if America did not attempt to directly ship supplies to the Central Powers, its economic pull could conceivably throw a major span in the works of Britain's attempts to control the amount of trade that neutrals like the Netherlands and Switzerland conducted with Germany.

On August 8th, the British Ambassador Cecil Spring Rice met with Andrew Carnegie and William Jennings Bryan, agreeing to open an on-going line of communication about British blockade policy. On August 10th, Bryan and Carnegie met privately, where they agreed to adopt the 1909 London Declaration concerning the Laws of Naval War as the basis of American policy toward the British blockade. On August 14th, in a largely symbolic move, the Senate and house of representatives ratified on a (mostly) party-line vote the 1909 London Declaration.

On August 19th, the British reclassified food as absolute contraband, allowing it to be captured and seized even if it was shipped on neutral ships through neutral ports. Bryan angrily berated the British ambassador for around an hour over this, but no further action was taken. Two weeks later, Britain announced that the entirety of the North Sea was a war zone, and began mining it. On September 15th, British declared that conditional contraband, which included food, forage and grain, gold and silver, harnesses, and horseshoes, could be seized if the ultimate destination of the cargo was an enemy belligerent, even if it was shipped on neutral boats to neutral ports. This was a clear violation of the London declaration, which only allowed for the seizure of conditional contraband if it was directly bound for an enemy port. In effect, it erased the distinction between absolute and conditional contraband, which was meant to allow neutrals to ship a variety of goods to neutral ports regardless of their ultimate destination.

On September 16th, Bryan met with Andrew Carnegie, Josephus Daniels (the Secretary of the Navy), and Franklin D. Roosevelt, (Assistant Secretary of the Navy). He canvassed options for responding to the blatant violation of the London declaration. The notion of sending several ships filled with grain to the Netherlands, escorted by American destroyers, was briefly mooted, but the lack of bases for the ships, Bryan's aversion to a potential conflict with Britain, and British naval superiority led to the plan being scuttled. More promising was the notion of a limited trade war to force Britain to back down. Bryan was wary, however, of starting such a trade war before the mid-terms: scaling back American grain and manufactured foodstuff exports to England would harm many key farming constituencies. In the end, it was decided to post-pone any response besides a harsh public condemnation of British policy until after the mid-terms.

In late December, there were several high profile cases of American merchant vessels being seized and their contents confiscated without compensation. Bryan called in Cecil Rice, suggesting that America may decide to draw down grain exports to England in the event of further seizures of American goods. A somewhat hare-brained scheme to reduce American food exports to England by "2% for each vessel carrying conditional contraband illegally seized" provoked genuine panic and a furious debate in the British Cabinet, with David Lloyd George and most of the Liberals arguing for the need to conciliate with America. In January, the British seizure of American vessels began to ebb, and next month, David Lloyd George and Edward Grey headed to Washington to try to hammer out a deal with Carnegie and Bryan.

They were aided greatly by the inane German decision to begin a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in the English Channel, which provoked equally fierce denunciations from Bryan. The Germans appeared to believe that, with the Americans now feuding with the British, there was little chance they would take real action against the submarine attacks. Instead, the Germans unwittingly hastened the conclusion of the Alexandria Agreements, which substantially reduced the simmering tensions between America and Britain. In return for sharp limits on the amount of conditional contraband that could flow into Dutch ports and a promise from Bryan to not interfere with private American financing of the British war effort, Britain agreed to abide by the terms of the London Declaration vis-a-vis American shipping. Despite Bryan's lofty, idealistic pronouncements, the agreement was one which served American interests: the freedom of the seas would not be protected for other neutrals. The British were mildly concerned that the deal had to be renewed within a year, especially since Bryan had announced an ambitious new naval program intended to build up the American fleet to rival Britain's. Nonetheless, they were relieved to have resolved the diplomatic crisis.

It was now Germany which was on the receiving end of Bryan's ire. After several American merchant ships were sunk by U-boats, Bryan exchanged several notes with the German foreign Gottlieb von Jagow, threatening to declare an official embargo on Germany and "coordinate policy more closely...with the British, who we have already found amenable to diplomatic overtures." Bryan had actually earned a good deal of leverage and respect in Germany from the negotiations with the British; it was widely felt that America was attempting to stay neutral in the war, and more pacific elements of the German government managed to force Tirpitz to return to a more conventional submarine campaign.

On the domestic policy front, 1915 was a year of great successes for Bryan after the legislative gridlock of 1914. This had a great deal to do with the midterms, which convinced the rank and file activists, party bosses, and congressmen of the Democratic Party that Bryan was a ticket to lasting political strength. In a year that many newspapers predicted would see Democratic losses in the Senate and House, the Democratic Party picked up seven Senate seats and lost only eighteen House races, keeping their large majority in the lower chamber.

The Senate victories gave the Democrats a filibuster-proof majority, and the party's enthusiasm propelled the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, creating a minimum wage, a bureau of workplace regulation, an 8-hour work-day for 25% of workers, and mandated over-time pay. Riding high on the wave of enthusiasm, Bryan endorsed women's suffrage later that year, announced an initiative to root out "party corruption", and declared the coming end of "American imperialism" in the Philippines, energizing his opposition and creating a new host of enemies. The sinking of several additional American merchant ships by German u-boats at the end of the year and several incidents of violence against American servicemen in Manila led to renewed charges of weakness, and Bryan's dithering response to both emboldened his presumptive Republican opponent, Theodore Roosevelt. 1916 would feature one of the longest and most vicious presidential campaigns in American history.

 

[Curby]

The Military History of the Great War, 1916

The Western Front

Among historians of the Great War, 1916 is considered a pivotal year. On the Western Front, both of the warring coalitions temporarily gained a strategic advantage at different points, and for brief moments, the more volatile manuever warfare of 1914 emerged once again. Some have argued that there were real possibilities for each of the main combatants to win the war by year's end. The failure of either of the power blocs to fully exploit these opportunities belied terminal structural issues in the military and civilian leadership structures of the leading powers in each coalition.

In 1915, the Hindenburg-Ludendoff Polish Offensive had brought Germany brilliant victories and permanently changed the strategic situation in the east. Yet, in a crucial sense, it failed: the offensive was meant to force Russia to make peace, and did nothing of the sort. Falkenhayn, disgraced by the disastrous First Battle of the Somme, was vindicated by the Russian disinterest in peace overtures. The Tsar felt a sense of loyalty to his entente allies, and, perhaps more importantly, the devastating defeats of 1915 nurtured in the Russian elite a desire to avenge the loss of Poland. When Hindenburg and Ludendorff advocated for offensives further into the Baltics and Byelorussia, they were overruled by a coalition that included the Kaiser, Bethmann Hollweg, and Falkenhayn. Their newfound position as national folk-heroes would not allow them to dictate policy. Not yet.

The massive Polish offensive had required significant German forces to be transferred from the western trenches. In late 1915, only around 1.7 million German troops stood opposite a force of 2.5 million French and British ones. Entente forces launched several minor offensives, but made no sustained and large-scale attempt to break the German lines, in retrospect a major strategic failure. By the end of the Polish offensive, there were shortages of artillery pieces, shells, and even more basic supplies like textiles. While early 1916 saw several dozen German divisions ferried into the west, these shortages of materiel would persist for significantly longer as Germany ramped up its industrial production to replenish its stocks of war supplies. Perhaps most importantly, this forced Germany to post-pone Falkenhayn's plan to attack the fortress of Verdun until later in the year.

Entente war strategy in 1916 called for a series of concentric offensives on the Central Powers. The British and French General Staff reasoned that the major advantage of the Central Powers was their interior lines of communication, which allowed them to easily divert troops to more vulnerable fronts. It was hoped that a simultaneous assault on many different fronts would paralyze the Central Powers, steadily deplete their man-power, and allow for multiple break-throughs that would end the war by the year's end.

This plan was plagued by two problems. Firstly, the position of Russia left it in little room to conduct genuine offensive operations in 1916. The destruction of the 1st and 2nd armies and the loss of much of the officer corps meant that the freshly raised divisions had little capacity for sustained offensive operations against Austria-Hungary. Secondly, British aid to Russia in the form of both raw materiel and financial assistance was already waning under the fiscal burden of supporting the rapidly swelling 2.5-million strong British volunteer army, which in 1916 began to be supplemented by the first conscripted soldiers. The successes of Germany in the east led American financiers to offer less favorable terms to Britain, who they knew was directing a large portion of the money raised in New York to Russia. Although the British suspected interference from Bryan, there was little evidence to prove such suspicions.

Eventually, the British government would turn to its wealthy domestic market to raise funds, but this would take time. In the mean-time, Lloyd George and Bonar Law both endorsed concentrating Britain's still considerable fiscal resources into bolstering the British Army. Of course, notwithstanding any expansion of Britain's armed forces, the failure to properly coordinate the military policy of "Concentric offensives" with the fiscal and strategic realities confronting Britain's allies would have consequences.

The French and British military staff considered two possible axis of attack for the planned summer offensive. Firstly, there was the Somme. German soldiers had already been pushed back in the area, and the trench system there was somewhat less extensive. Pushing into the salient around Noyon would threaten the substantial German concentration to the south, along the Aisne river. The second option was to attack in the North, around Ypres and Passcendaele. Such an attack would offer the opportunity of "folding up" the German front to its south, and liberating the key industrial city of Lille.

Although certain elements in the French command favored an attack around the Somme to immediately liberate French territory, Joffre and Haig's joint endorsement of the northern axis of advance led to the scuttling of the Somme plan. Several factors militated in favor of an attack on Ypres. Firstly, the German forces in the area were weaker and more dispersed than those elsewhere in the front. Secondly, the Somme region had already seen heavy fighting, which meant that French and British command assumed that Germany would be more prepared for any offensive in the area. Thirdly, the position of the offensive in the far north would give the Germans fewer potential directions from which to launch a counter-offensive. Fourthly, the British hoped that a break-through toward the Netherlands and the eventual presence of Entente troops along its border would force the government to stop accepting American goods destined for Germany. Finally, the similarity of the basic plan of the offensive to the Battle of Oise, which saved Paris and the French Army from destruction, cannot be ignored. A flanking attack from the north to fold up the German front and force a general retreat had worked once; with the Entente now having a decisive superiority of materiel, there was little reason why it would not work again.

On June 16th, two weeks after the beginning of Italian and Russian offensives in Trentino and Galicia, the German positions north and south of the city of Ypres fell under apocalyptic artillery bombardment. The first three days of the battle saw a series of devestating defeats inflicted on the German divisions in the area, which were outgunned and outmanned. The position was sufficiently removed from the rest of the front that German officers had trouble ferrying reinforcements rapidly into the area. German soldiers were foced to retreat east; Ypres fell within a week. The next target was Passchendaele. Rather than fighting against the superior entente force, Falkenhayn called the troops back from the city, setting up lines to its east and south. This decision triggered a torrent of criticism from the more militaristic aspects of the German government, but the decision to make a fighting retreat likely minimized German casualties and allowed for more extensive fortifications to be built up.

The fall of Passchendaele on July 8th and Messines on July 15th signalled the success of the first phase of the offensive. In truth, however, the entente command were quite frustrated: the paucity of German troops in the area had meant that an enormous amount of entente war materiel had been expended on the destruction of a few German divisions and the seziure of a relatively small strip of land. The initial offensive called for an offensive south, toward Lille, but the increased concentration of German troops in the area would make an advance in that direction more costly. The British wished to break out toward Bruges, but there were not insubstantial fears that such an attack would render the army vulnerable to a counter-attack from the south. The French suspected that the British were more interested in placing pressure on the Dutch than in reclaiming French territory. Delays in determining the next point of attack allowed the Germans to finally concentrate troops in the region, and the disaster of Russian offensives in the east permitted even more troops to be ferried in from the Galician front.

The battle of Lille was an unmitigated disaster for the Entente. Whereas a quick advance east may have forced the Germans to withdraw from the area, or at least enter into a campaign of manuever in which the Entente's superior local numbers may have helped them, the decision to launch the better part of Kitchener's volunteer army against the extensive system of trenches north of the city would have been costly in the best of scenarios. On July 27th, the French Sixth and British Fourth Army advanced toward Lille, taking 70,000 combined casualties on a single day. The trenches were breached at several points, but were mostly recaptured by German counter-attacks on the next day. Over the next three months, British and French losses would steadily mount as Germany made good its shortage of artillery. Perhaps most disastrous for French morale was the shelling of Lille by French guns in a futile attempt to disrupt German logistics.

By late August, the strategic initiative had shifted against the Entente. The British volunteer force was not defeated, but it was exhausted, and the rate of training in Britain was not sufficient to replace British causalties. The cartelization of the German armaments industry was at last showing results, and Germany had taken the time to stock-pile shells for a counter-offensive. Additionally, the defeat of the Russian and Italian offensives and the Austrian incursion into Italy forced British reserves to be diverted from France.

In Germany, the general staff poured over their options. Falkenhayn wished to commence with the original assault on Verdun to draw the French into an attritional battle that would exhaust their remaining reserves and allow for a front-wide offensive. Hindenburg and Ludendorff favored an enveloping counter-offensive around Lille which would shatter entente lines and allow the Schlieffen Plan to be re-enacted. The Kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg expressed skepticism around both of these plans, instead favoring an offensive in the Somme that could break through to Amiens and then Paris.

Ultimately, it was Falkenhayn's plan that was selected. He had been credited with the defeats inflicted on the British around Lille, which did much to shore up his waning reputation. There was little desire to expend more German lives on a costly, Cannae-style "enveloping offensive"; Falkenhayn promised to use geography and artillery to reduce the actual toll that the fighting would take on the German Army.

On September 3rd, the Battle of Verdun began. The Germans had assembled an overwhelming superiority of forces and materiel in the area, and aimed to seize the heights along the Meuse river, which would allow them to direct heavy artillery fire down on the Verdun forts. Within two days, the powerful fort Douaumont fell. Joffre believed that the main axis of the German offensive was still set to begin elsewhere, and did not divert significant reserves to the area. On September 20th, the vital fort Vaux fell. Despite the German successes, the offensive was far costlier than planned, with the French troops in the region putting up fanatical resistance to the German advance. The fall of Fort Vaux, closer to the main forts of verdun, prompted Joffre to commit his reserves to the area. This slowed down, but did not stop the German advance. On October 7th, panic set in as German troops surrounded and successfully stormed Souville.

With the centrally situated Souville secured, the Germans now had control of the "Meuse Heights". In accord with Falkenhayn's predictions, a series of counter-offensives attempted to dislodge the Germans from their position, only to be devestated by the elevated heavy artillery positioned in the area around fort Souville. Then, however, the French offensives stopped. They had learned their lesson at Lille, and though the loss of the fort constituted a significant blow to prestige, deteriorating morale within the French army had prompted Joffre to go over to the defensive. A month after capturing Souville, all was quiet on the western front.

This was a problem for German plans, and particularly for Falkenhayn, who had promised a sweeping offensive toward Paris by the end of the year. Despite the heavy blow dealt to the French Army, there was no decisive breakthrough; nor was there a complete shattering of the French reserves despite the higher proportion of causalties suffered by the French Army in the opening stage of the battle of Verdun. Fearing the loss of his own position, Falkenhayn staked his reputation on a November offensive toward the two forts of Belleville and St.Michel. He believed that this would force the French to throw their remaining reserves into the area. While Joffre did direct some additional troops to the area, they were hardly sufficient to hold back the German advance, which now proceeded under heavy artillery fire from the Meuse heights. Within three weeks, both of the forts had fallen, and the town of Verdun itself stood within reach of the German Army.

However, the offensive south had neglected the safety of the German right flank. On the western bank of the Meuse, a concentration of British troops had been built up over the last month. The british draft had begun to kick into high gear, and slowly but surely the vast resources of the British empire had been marshalled to create a force with more artillery and heavy guns per capita than any other army on earth. As the first snows of December fell, the soldiers of the 3rd and 5th army groups smashed into the German lines east north of Belleville, spreading panic and confusion. The Christmas Offensive had begun.