World War One: A Short History Read Free

join the crew of professors cheering on the national cause. But he and his like had led the younger generation down a deadly path. Germany produced a navy, and it took one third of the defencebudget. The money, diverted from the army, made it unable to take on the two-front war that the Franco-Russian alliance portended. There was not enough to take in more than half of the young men who could have been trained: they could not be fed and clothed. They were exempted, and the German land army in 1914 was hardly larger than the French, although in 1914 the French population stood at under 40 million, to the Germans’ 65 million. The German battleships themselves were very well built, but there were too few of them, and they were hopelessly vulnerable. They spent almost the entire First World War in harbour, until, at the end, threatened with pointless sacrifice, the crews mutinied, bringing down the German empire itself. But the navy, designed only to sail across the North Sea and therefore not needing the weight of coal that worldwide British warships required, could lay on extra armour. This was such an obvious piece of blackmail that it pushed the British into a considerable effort – not only did they outbuild the Germans, almost two-to-one, in ships, but they also made defensive arrangements with France and Russia. These involved colonial bargains – Egypt for Morocco with the French (the Entente Cordiale ) in 1904, and Persia with the Russians in 1907. There were informal understandings regarding naval cooperation if it came to trouble. To each of these steps, the German reaction was blundering and blustering – a demand for some slice of derelict Morocco in 1905, encouragement of frivolous Austrian aggressiveness in the Balkans in 1909 and a gunboat sent to Morocco in 1911. This ‘sabre-rattling’ went down well with a great part of opinion at home, but it created an air of international crisis, and by 1914 an emissary of the American President was talking of militarism gone mad.
    Around this time there emerged a matter with which the world has had to live ever since. President Eisenhower, in the 1960s, found the right phrase for it: ‘the military-industrialcomplex’. War industry became the most powerful element in the economy, employing thousands if not millions, taking a large part of the budget, and stimulating all sorts of industries on the side, including the writing of columns in newspapers. Besides, war industry was subject to bewildering change: what appeared to be an insane waste of money at one stage might turn out to be essential (aircraft being the obvious case), whereas what appeared to be common sense turned out to consist of white elephants (fortresses being, again, the obvious case). Technology was becoming expensive and unpredictable, and by 1911 there was an arms race. By then, any country’s armaments had become an excuse for any other country’s armaments to increase, and there were crises in the Mediterranean and the Balkans to make every country feel vulnerable. When Germany sent her gunboat to Morocco in the summer of 1911, she uncocked a gun. But the finger on the trigger was, peculiarly, Italy’s.
    If Turkish territory was to be parcelled out, then why should not Italy take her share? The British had taken Egypt, the French, North Africa. Italian empire-builders looked at the rest, and went to war. It is a strange fact of modern European history that Italy, weakest of the Powers, brings the problems to a head: no Cavour, no Bismarck; no Mussolini, no Hitler. 4 Now, Italy opened the series of events leading to war in 1914. Knowing that, because of the Moroccan crisis, the British, French and Germans would do nothing to stop her, she attacked Ottoman Turkey and tried to seize Libya. The Turks were too weak, and in any event had no ships to defend even the islands off the Anatolian coast, which the Italians seized. The prospect of an Ottoman collapse caused the various Balkan states, in