The Unending Mystery of World War I

The First World War is endlessly fascinating—to historians, to the public, and to me. It was so devastating, so unexpected, and it set in motion thirty years of war and turmoil. By 1990, 25,000 books and articles had been published on the subject [1] (and I have read four major books published since then, the latest being July 1914 by Sean McMeekin) [2]. No one can stop trying to answer the fundamental question, Why did it happen?

I have an idea.

First, it shouldn’t have happened. European leadership was closely knit: Kaiser Wilhelm was King George’s first cousin (both grandsons of Queen Victoria); Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas signed their letters to one another “Willie” and “Nicky.” Names indicate the linked international relationships: There were German ambassadors named Pourtales and Lichnowsky, a Russian minister named Hartwig, and Austria’s chief of staff was named Hoyos. The European nations were at peace and generally well off. They hadn’t had a full-scale European war since the Congress of Vienna arranged peace in 1815, although the French and Prussians took to blows in 1870-71 and European countries carved up much of Africa.

You’ve heard many of the explanations for the war.  Mobilization started too soon and was hard to stop. France and Russia had defensive treaties, as did Germany and Austria, and they were all under pressure to carry them out. Diplomatic maneuvers were fast and confusing—Nicholas, for example, answered the wrong telegram from Wilhelm.

Diplomats continually prevaricated, misunderstood one another, and outsmarted themselves. Germany gave a “blank check” to Austria to attack Serbia but assumed the attack would happen fast, before Russia became involved. It didn’t.

England was too busy handling Home Rule in Ireland to focus clearly; France was caught up in a distracting scandal. (Henriette Caillaux, wife of the finance minister, shot a newspaper editor in cold blood; she was acquitted the day Austria declared war on Serbia).

There were bigger factors, too. Germany was getting more powerful  (it had a navy now); perhaps it was inevitable that other European countries would try to cut it down to size. And Germany’s military plan (the Schlieffen Plan) assumed war against Russia and France, but the plan demanded that Germany fight against France first. So it wasn’t enough for Russia alone to declare war; Germany needed France to step in, too. It did. Also,  invading neutral Belgium was an essential part of the German plan.

All of the explanations are partially true, and there are more. I have an explanation, too, which was inspired by reading a book by William McNeil.[3]

On the one hand, the diplomats recognized they were on the brink of a “world war,”  involving at least four major nations (Russia, France, Austria, and German) and probably others (such as Great Britain). But they also believed the war would be short. There hadn’t been a long war since Napoleon’s exploits, and the Schlieffen Plan was meant to ensure victory quickly.

My view is that, when the tensions got too high, the diplomats took comfort in the fact that it would be brief and thus threw up their hands, allowing it to happen.

But that was a terrible miscalculation. The opponents were so well-matched that there was no quick end. In fact, long, pointless trench warfare is the very essence of our image of World War I.

And, as McNeil has written, once it became clear that there would be no short cut, nations began to organize themselves to pursue a long war.  “[T]he belligerents were impelled to improvise means to sustain the rival armies, month after month, feeding, equipping, supplying, training, healing, and burying men literally by the millions.” [4]

They became very good at it. And when they all were equally good at it, no one could win. Their concerted ability, which he called “managerial metamorphosis,” prolonged the war, with incalculably harmful results. Had the leadership known this before the war, they would have been far more cautious about taking their fatal steps.

[1] Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), xxvii. I wrote about his book in 2018.

[2]Sean McMeekin, July 1914 (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

[3] I previously discussed this book, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

[3] McNeil, 317-318.