Strachan and the Great War: A Lifelong Quest

A Personal Note

More than three decades ago, I first came across Hew Strachan when I read his superb monograph, European Armies and the Conduct of War. In 1996 I had the privilege of meeting him at a ‘Total War’ conference dealing with the war of 1914–18 at the former monastery of Münchenwiler, Switzerland. He was nattily attired in shorts and a rugby shirt, having just jogged through the medieval town of Murten. And in 2017 we shared a platform adorned with gold chairs at a strategy conference organized by the National Institute for Defence Studies in Tokyo. For three days we were marched through the conference program in strict hierarchical order—the Royal Archer Brigadier and Queen’s Bodyguard of Scotland followed by a phalanx of professors, associate professors, and assistant professors. In between lay numerous academic conferences, mainly in Germany and in the United States. It was always a pleasure to share the stage with the doyen of military historians of the First World War. And one piece of parallel serendipity. Strachan was commissioned by Oxford University Press to write a replacement for C.R.M.F. Cruttwell’s one-volume A History of the Great War, 1914–1918 (1934); he turned it into a massive three-volume project. Arnold of London approached me to undertake an edited translation of Hans Herzfeld’s Der Erste Weltkrieg (1968); I talked them into a new work on both Central Powers at war. Hew Strachan, then Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow, was the general editor of Arnold’s Modern Wars series and graciously read my manuscript and provided an expert preface to the book. ¹ These personal contacts as well as far too many years of reading Strachan’s works give me some confidence to try to assess the scholar I would cheekily call the Hans Delbrück of England (and Scotland).

‘Each war has its own peculiarities, but one would think that no war was ever so peculiar as the present one’. ² These words, written in 1916 by Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, perfectly encapsulate Strachan’s academic career. He has followed those ‘peculiarities’ with an unbending passion. He has done so always from a multinational and comparative perspective, and always with reference to the best works of scholars in Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He has refused to hide behind what he called a ‘cloak for little more than laziness or monolingualism’. ³ He has spread his views not only through academic books and journals, but also in the press, on radio, and via television.

War in History

Hew Strachan did military history a great service when he and Dennis Showalter decided in 1992 to found and to edit a new peer-reviewed quarterly journal, War in History. Its first issue appeared two years later and was an instant success. As one would expect from Strachan, the journal’s scope is broad thematically: economic, military, political, and social history; as well as geographically: Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia-New Zealand, Europe, and the Middle East. Largely due to Strachan’s and Showalter’s insistence on addressing even the most difficult and contentious of questions, War in History has often addled its more traditional readers. I shall offer but two examples. In 1996 the journal published an English-language translation of Wilhelm Deist’s provocative article, ‘The Military Collapse of the German Empire: The Reality Behind the Stab-in-the-Back Myth’. ⁴ The renowned German military historian argued that in the second half of 1918 there had been a mass absconding (somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million) of rank-and-file soldiers on the Western Front in what he termed a ‘covert strike’. The corollary was that the army had not been ‘stabbed in the back’ by the home front; rather, it had simply collapsed from within. Deist thus attacked two holy grails of German military historians: the oft-repeated claim that the army had been overwhelmed merely by the Allies’ material and manpower superiority, and the myth of the Dolchstoß propagated by former officers to obscure their responsibility for the defeat. ⁵ As well, his article took some of the shine off Allied triumphalism concerning the glorious ‘Hundred Days’ of 1918—which was front and centre in Anglo-Saxon narratives at its centenary. A recent counter-argument that there had taken place not a ‘covert strike’ but ‘an ordered surrender’ led by junior officers has not stood the test of documentary scrutiny, nor has it diminished the explosive impact of Deist’s pioneering article. ⁶ War in History and its two founding editors in 1996 showed their mettle.

The second example concerns the international brouhaha caused by Terence Zuber’s blustery claim, ‘There never was a Schlieffen Plan’. War in History was not afraid to enter the fray, in 1999 publishing Zuber’s article, ‘The Schlieffen Plan Reconsidered’. ⁷ As was to be expected, the outcry from military historians was shrill. Leading the charge were Robert T. Foley, Terence M. Holmes, and Annika Mombauer, to name just a few. In the fall of 2004 the Military History Research Office (MGFA) of the Bundeswehr decided to bring the two sides together at Potsdam to debate Zuber’s claim. Zuber contributed a chapter on ‘The Myth of the Schlieffen Plan’, while Gerhard Groß countered with a piece entitled, ‘There was a Schlieffen Plan’. ⁸ The result was a massive tome two years later that radically corrected Zuber’s central argument. Regrettably, Zuber declined to have his chapter included in the English-language edition that appeared in 2014. ⁹ Critical to both volumes were more than 200 pages of documents covering the German deployment plans from 1893/94 to 1914/15. This was the kind of debate based on archival foundations that delights good historians. Again, Strachan, Showalter, and War in History had shown their mettle.

On Origins

Hew Strachan has remained a voice of sanity in the circus that never ceases to accompany historians’ attempts to detect the causes of the First World War. ¹⁰ He has steadfastly refused to pay homage to—and much less to participate in—the numerous monocausal and patently ahistorical interpretations put forth by scholars seeking their ‘15 minutes of fame’ (Marshall McLuhan). He has not turned his back on half a century of research into the origins of the war launched by Fritz Fischer’s pathbreaking Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961). He understands the dictates of timing and sequence: when one speaks of the issuing of a ‘blank cheque’, it is critical to remember that it takes two to do so; one to ask for it (Austria-Hungary) and one to give it (Germany). As he does in all his writings, Strachan carefully follows chronology and deftly separates phraseology from action. He uses that rarity, common sense.

It would be a disservice to this Festschrift to review the rivers of ink that have been spilled on the topic of ‘origins’, much less on the much-abused topic of ‘responsibility’. Once again, Strachan has rejected all simplistic mononational explanations such as: Germany was ‘solely’ responsible for the war; Russia’s Ottoman policy prompted its decision to turn a local Balkan war into the general European war; France’s decision to back Russian policy during the July Crisis brought about the ‘Great Folly’ of 1914; and, of course, Britain by standing aloof all too long contributed significantly to the outbreak of war. Few scholars managed (or even bothered) to trace the origins of the war to its starting point: Austria-Hungary. Strachan did.

There is no space here to take up Strachan’s numerous writings on the origins of the war one-by-one, and hence I will tackle his main contribution in The First World War: To Arms. Following the pioneering work of the American historian Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., Strachan offers a welcome relief from the German-centric Fischer interpretation, according to which Berlin took Vienna ‘on the leash’. In fact, Vienna made the decision for war, set the pace and the timing for its outbreak, foreclosed all options except for war, and plunged Europe first into what Strachan calls the Third Balkan War and then into the greater European war. ‘Austria-Hungary’s decision to fight Serbia was its own.’ ¹¹ Vienna fully expected that Russia would back its ‘little Slav brother’, Serbia, and hence it dispatched Chef de Cabinet Alexander Hoyos to Berlin to secure German support in the event of a European war. And Berlin did, indeed, promise Vienna backing in whatever action it took in the Balkans. But this, Strachan argues, was not part of any ‘grand design’, of any Griff nach der Weltmacht, but rather a confused and inelegant bid for continental semi-hegemony. The ‘polychratic’ nature of the German government (Stig Förster) vitiated ‘continuity or clarity in German policy’. Again, Strachan is on the mark: although Berlin ‘issued the cheque, it was Vienna that had requested it and it was Vienna that cashed it’. ¹² And that cheque was, indeed, ‘blank’. Mercifully, there is no talk of the decision makers at Vienna and Berlin in 1914 as ‘sleepwalkers’. ¹³

With Austria-Hungary and Germany well on the path to war, the ball was in Russia’s court. Strachan is not side-tracked by recent attempts to put the onus for starting the war on Russia’s aggressive Near East policy, ¹⁴ but rather keeps his focus on the Balkans. Put more bluntly, by partially mobilizing its army on 28 July 1914, that is, even before Belgrade had responded to an Austro-Hungarian ultimatum allowing Vienna free rein to hunt down the assassins in Serbia, St Petersburg had issued what Strachan calls ‘a “blank cheque” of its own’. ¹⁵ That action, which was certain to be countered by German and Austro-Hungarian mobilization, left France with little choice but to honour its alliance obligations to Russia of 1892 and 1894. French policy in the July Crisis, in Strachan’s estimation, was ‘remarkably consistent and predictable’. President Raymond Poincaré did not succumb to the hysteria of the moment, but rather weighed his options carefully and charted the one course designed to preserve France’s status as a great power: to ‘cement the Triple Alliance’ at any cost. Indeed, Strachan argues, there was a ‘now or never’ calculation behind Poincaré’s diplomacy. Domestically, the left had made major gains in the elections that spring and was likely to demand revocation of the three-year military service law, and internationally the growing evidence of Russian military strength combined with the Austro-Hungarian-German challenge to Serbia convinced French planners, in Strachan’s words, ‘that if war was to come to Europe, better now . . . than later’. ¹⁶

That leaves Britain. Strachan resists what he calls the temptation to see London’s century-old policy of the balance of power in Europe as ‘creating an inevitability about Britain’s entry to the First World War’. Its own territorial integrity not directly threatened, the British government had time to debate its entry to the war both in Cabinet and in Parliament. But the Foreign Office’s reluctance to ‘treat foreign policy in an open way’, and Sir Edward Grey’s decision to ‘keep diplomacy from the cabinet’, created what has been called a ‘conservative and insular’ perspective in foreign policy. ¹⁷ In the end, however, Strachan does lean towards a modicum of ‘inevitability’: had Britain failed in 1914 to support France and Russia, ‘its links with them would have been forfeit’ and its only recourse ‘an Anglo–German alliance’. Germany’s demand on 2 August that Belgium allow its forces free passage through its territory, ‘became the symbol around which [Prime Minister Herbert H.] Asquith could rally the majority of his cabinet’. ¹⁸ And the moral obligation to uphold the neutrality treaty of 1839 carried with it what Sir Michael Howard famously called a ‘continental commitment’. Strachan spares the reader discussion of Niall Ferguson’s spurious claim that Britain was responsible for turning a European war into a world war because of its false reading of German policy and aims in 1914. ¹⁹ A German-dominated Continent in 1914 would not have been akin to today’s European Union, as Ferguson claims.

But what about the ‘big causes’ behind the race to war, such as imperial rivalry, economic depression, commercial imperatives, and capitalism? Or the immediate causes such as popular enthusiasm and intellectual conviction? Strachan concludes that war came about in 1914 ‘not of collective forces nor of long-range factors, but of the individual’. ²⁰ In other words, there was contingency; there were paths taken and not taken. ²¹ Honour, pride, personal ambition, revenge, and great-power status all played a role in the race to war. That few, if any, of the ‘men of 1914’ had the slightest notion about the nature of the war on which they were embarking does not reduce their culpability.

The Policy-Strategy Fault Line

When he published The First World War: To Arms in 2001, Strachan was obviously influenced by Terence Zuber’s article two years earlier in War in History, in which the US Army major claimed that ‘There never was a Schlieffen Plan’. Strachan suggested that future histories of war planning would have to be ‘revised in light of Zuber’. ²² In subsequent publications Strachan, most likely impressed by the Potsdam edition of pre-war German deployment plans, shifted his emphasis from the interface between operations and tactics to that between operations and policy. Sir William Robertson’s 1916 comment on the ‘peculiar’ nature of the war in Europe likely shaped Strachan’s shift to strategy. In numerous lectures at prestigious military and civilian academies, he tackled the writings of Carl von Clausewitz (see Sibylle Scheipers’s contribution to this volume) and especially Hans Delbrück. For the ‘dynamics’ created by the war of 1914–18 had involved all participants ‘in an interactive and escalatory spiral’ in what they quickly realized was an ‘existential conflict’, that is, one of national survival. ²³ One detects in Strachan’s endeavours a richness of thought and a fullness of analysis that make them quite remarkable. For, they are the works of a mature historian analysing wildly diverse societies at war, of one who has thought long and hard about war from a serious comparative perspective. And of one who understands the vital importance of that task, as enunciated by such classic strategic thinkers as Sun Tzu (‘Warfare is the greatest affair of state. . . . It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed’) and Clausewitz (‘[W]e must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together’). ²⁴

There are no simple heroes or villains in Strachan’s work on the First World War. The ‘narrow political vision’ of the soldiers, he reminds us, was every bit ‘matched by the remarkable ignorance’ of the civilian leaders. ²⁵ Neither the ‘brass-hats’ nor the ‘frock-coats’ in 1914 thought of national policy and military operations as running on convergent lines. Many had learned from Clausewitz’s writings that war tended to escalate rather than to be limited or constrained. But what did this mean in 1914? As Strachan clearly lays out, staff colleges had taught their students that strategy was all about breakthrough and envelopment, about lines of operations. Strategy, in a word, was tactics (at best operations) writ large. The object of strategy was to bring about the decisive battle—not to serve the greater national policy. The prevailing view of staff college professors, Strachan offers, was perhaps best enunciated by Ferdinand Foch at the École de Guerre: ‘Strategy does not exist by itself, as it is not worth anything without tactical efficiency.’ Or by G.F.R. Henderson, who taught both Douglas Haig and William Robertson at the Staff College, and who defined strategy as ‘the operations which lead up to battle’. ²⁶ For these professors and their students, war was a science rather than an art.

The policy-strategy fault line had been cracked open publicly in Imperial Germany before 1914. On one side stood General Staff officers, taught by Schlieffen to concentrate on operations, on battles of encirclement and annihilation such as Cannae (216 BC); on the other side stood the civilian Professor Hans Delbrück, who saw strategy as a servant of policy and who never failed to point out that while Hannibal had won the battle, Rome had won the war. Their feud continued in the First World War, this time focused on the concept of attrition. Delbrück is widely recognized as the inventor of the term Ermattungsstrategie; attrition in English and gignotage in French. ²⁷ Unsurprisingly, given the horrid scale and slaughter of the Great War, his concept of attrition has fascinated Strachan. The German civilian critic had used the term Ermattungsstrategie in a classic sense, taking Frederick II of Prussia as his historical example. As Strachan lectured a US neoconservative think-tank in June 2014, Delbrück did not highlight battle ‘for the purpose of the war’, but rather, given Frederick’s overall inferiority, often in order to ‘shun battle’. A concept that likely did not attract Strachan to his listeners! In Delbrück’s sense of the term, Frederick II had attrited (ermatten) his enemies by manoeuvre, by marching from front to front, in the process exhausting his foes, wearing them out. He had used his ‘central geographical position to exploit the advantages of time and space’. ²⁸ Strachan here explored a dimension of the term ‘attrition’ that would not have found favour with the ‘brass-hats’ of 1914–18. For them, attrition simply meant slaughter and waste. Numbers killed was the measure of success. And the term had a useful political purpose, Strachan reminds us: it could ‘rationalise failure’ to the ‘frock-coats’ at home. ²⁹ Verdun was to Erich von Falkenhayn what the Somme was to Douglas Haig. ³⁰ Strachan saw true battles of attrition only at sea: the British ‘hunger blockade’ of Germany, and the latter’s campaign of ‘unrestricted’ submarine warfare. ³¹ Economic rather than military attrition.

The culprit in all this for Strachan was the fact that the face of the First World War had changed radically. The ‘problem for all parties in the First World War’, he stated in 2015, ‘was that in practice the complexion of the war was defined not from the top down, but from the bottom up’. Put differently, not only was the Clausewitzean dictum that war served the national policy turned on its head, but so also was the staff colleges’ sanctity of the dominance of operations. The promised decisive battles never eventuated. Instead, King Tactics ruled. Generals and their staffs might issue grand operational designs, but the ‘real war’ was in the hands of junior officers. The ‘linear battlefield’, Strachan argued, ‘caused command decisions to travel downwards to the front, as the corps lost out to the division, the division to the brigade, the brigade to the battalion, the battalion to the company, the company to the platoon, and even the platoon to the squad’. ³² Here, he obviously had in mind the famous German ‘storm troopers’ (Stoßtrupp).

Strachan closely related the descent of strategy to the level of tactics to the advent of trench warfare—which, in turn, gave rise to a whole new vocabulary such as machine warfare, ³³ mechanical war, a battle of material, and industrialized war. Technology came to the forefront and sprouted ‘all-embracing and pervasive’ ideas that confused pre-war notions of tactics, operations, and strategy; ideas that ‘subordinated ends to means’. ³⁴ Whereas most students of the war of 1914–18 see in trench warfare full justification of the old saw that the front-line soldiers were ‘lions led by donkeys’, Strachan almost alone has worked out a symbiosis of tactics to operations to strategy. At the tactical level, trench warfare was adopted to protect the soldiers from the hideous destructive power of industrialized warfare—read artillery. Operationally, trench warfare allowed armies to hold more ground with fewer men, thus freeing them up for duty elsewhere. And strategically, trench warfare ‘defended territory and the resources, both human and industrial, that the territory sustained’. In the process, tactics dominated strategy. But it also ‘made war more total’, ‘unrefined and unstratified’. ³⁵

This concept of ‘total war’ has served as a background for Strachan’s writings on the First World War. At the 1996 Münchenwiler conference on ‘Great War, Total War’ mentioned at the start of this article, he offered a sage survey of European conflict from ‘Cabinet War to Total War’ in the years 1861 to 1918. Strachan dates the term ‘total war’ back to 1918, when the French nationalist journalist Léon Daudet used the phrase la guerre totale to define a war that had spread to society in the political, economic, financial, and industrial domains. More famously, in 1935 General Erich Ludendorff would give the concept of total war cachet in Germany. ³⁶ Well versed in the writings of Clausewitz, Strachan was always careful not to confuse ‘total war’ with the German theorist’s concept of ‘absolute war’. The latter to Clausewitz was a theoretical abstract, an uninterrupted crescendo of violence that can never be attained, but that merely serves as a yardstick by which to measure ‘real war’. ³⁷ This is a point that unfortunately escaped Basil Liddell Hart.

The Sinews of War

In all his work on the policy–strategy nexus, Strachan, unlike many military historians, is never amiss to address the matter of war financing. To be sure, his detailed attention to global finances and the World War has led him down the slippery slope of statistics. For the only time that I am aware of, he comes close to drowning the reader in numbers: chapter 10 of The First World War: To Arms, entitled ‘Financing the War’, takes up almost 180 pages of fine print. ³⁸ The numbers are simply staggering, going from three zeros to six, to nine, and on occasion even to twelve. The currencies also offer a bewildering plethora of pounds sterling, US dollars, French francs, Austrian crowns, Russian roubles, and German marks, to name but the major species.

The Polish banker I.S. Bloch famously predicted before 1914 that modern wars would be so expensive and so prolonged that the costs in men and money would deter nations from going to war. ‘Bloch’s military analysis’, Strachan writes, was correct, ‘but his financial calculations totally wrong’. ³⁹ In 1914 no one worried about money. The war would be short and the gains (in terms of territory, reparations, and indemnities) immense. This also did not pan out. Strachan offers a striking example: Imperial Germany by 1914 had set aside a war chest of 205 million marks—at a time when the Reichsbank estimated that mobilization alone would cost 1,800 million marks; and even this was optimistic as the August 1914 mobilization amounted to 2,047 million Marks. How to cover the immense deficit? Strachan offers a simple answer, and one that remains so lucrative to governments today: vast amounts of borrowing. Taxation in 1914 was mainly indirect—customs and excise—and even Britain, which had a system of income tax, covered but 20 per cent of the war’s cost in this manner. The way out was credit—loans. Strachan identified three major forms: short-term treasury bills (which in Britain raised note circulation by 1,154 per cent during the war); war bonds (which would have to be repaid by future generations); and overseas credit (notably Britain borrowing $75 million a week in the United States by 1917, and using some of these funds to underwrite the war efforts of Italy and France). ⁴⁰ The simple fact is that most financiers had grossly underestimated the state’s ability to borrow. As long as there was a chance of victory for one side, credit was always available. By 1917, to use a modern analogy, the debt loads of most Entente states with American creditors had grown so large that they were ‘too big to fail’.

Since Bloch, Strachan posits, historians and political economists have not done better. Their focus has been almost exclusively on the war’s consequences—inflation, declining real wages, depression, food shortages, unemployment—rather than on the financing of the war itself. Economic and financial cooperation among the Entente and its American banker, he argues, began in February 1915. Finance tightened the European alliances. ‘Britain became the conduit for its allies’ credit. But credit could be stretched too thin. The US Federal Reserve Board’s warning to its members in November 1916 ‘against over-investment in foreign treasury bills’, Strachan cheekily and counter-factually suggests, had it been enforced might have been more effective than Germany’s campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare in stopping the Entente’s transatlantic trade. ⁴¹ After all, money, the Roman statesman Cicero had counselled, was the nerve of war.

Munitions constituted another area of miscalculation. The major powers had stockpiled artillery shells sufficient for a minimum three months of fighting—at 1870–71 levels of expenditures. But the war of 1914 demanded more. By October 1914, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia experienced a ‘shell shortage’. The cause, Strachan offers, was not so much the fact that the ‘short-war illusion’ proved to be exactly that, an illusion, but that the nature of war had radically changed. ‘The principal precipitant of shell shortage’, Strachan argued, ‘was trench warfare’. In a static war (late 1914), the lines of supply from factory to front became secure; the rate of fire exceeded all expectations; and gunners were able to identify more targets. Moreover, there arose a demand for different types of shells: shrapnel against dispersed enemy formations, and high explosives against men dug in. The generals explained the failures of their various war plans and operations on the lack of high-explosive shells. Why search for greater operational effectiveness when the solution lay in economic and industrial areas—more secure raw materials, more skilled labour, and greater availability of plant? ⁴²

Trench warfare, Strachan reasons, helped to alleviate the ‘shell shortage’ as it reintroduced the need for less highly specialized precision engineering and machine tools as well as mammoth field guns. Mortars and grenades harked back to the age of siege warfare. They required less skill to produce than high-explosive shells. But, Strachan notes, they also brought a decline in quality of production. In 1915 France lost 600 field guns through premature explosion. In 1916 some 30 per cent of the shells fired by the British at the Somme were duds. ⁴³ But the solution to the stalemate on the Western Front remained industrial. More machines, as alluded to earlier, meant fewer soldiers at the front. ‘The trade-off between machinery and manpower’ needed fine-tuning. Automatic weapons, light machine guns, flame-throwers, tanks, and ever more artillery, Strachan calculates, could substitute for men with rifles and thus release labour from the front line to accelerate the production of ‘machines’ at home. ⁴⁴ Germany’s most famous infantryman, Ernst Jünger, coined the term ‘workers of war’ to depict the industrialized battlefield of the twentieth century.

Strachan offers a final, and contentious, verdict on the war regarding the weight of the United States in deciding the Allied victory. While most American scholars see the vast money supply of New York and the abundant manpower pool of the American heartland as critical to the victory of November 1918, Strachan reminds his readers that the issue is not quite so simple. First, American financial aid dried up considerably after the United States entered the war in April 1917. Second, the creation of a million-man army in the United States diverted American war production to those soldiers rather than to the European allies. And third, it was mainly France that was called upon to supply the American Expeditionary Force with the more sophisticated weapons of war, such as airplanes, tanks, and field artillery. ‘The decisive nature of American might in the Second World War’, the mature historian cautions, should not be ‘projected back on to the First’. In this, as in so much in the areas of finances and industrial mobilization, the second volume of The First World War (to be entitled No Quarter) will undoubtedly flesh out much of this in great detail and thus will resonate well among scholars of the First World War on both sides of the Atlantic.

Great War: Global War?

Apart from the comparative nature of his work on the First World War, Strachan is also widely recognized not only for reminding his readers that there was more to the war than the Western Front—such as the Eastern Front, the Balkans, Italy, Turkey—but also for calling attention to its global dimension. The war could hardly have been restricted to continental Europe given that it was being fought by empires: the British, the French, the German, the Ottoman, and the Russian. Indeed, as Strachan points out, the world was ‘globalized’ already by 1914—almost a century before ‘globalization’ became an overused liberal buzzword. ⁴⁵ Submarine cables connected the continents. Shipping lines vied with one another for trade and for ribands. Multinational consortiums financed and built railroads in Africa, Asia, and South America. Banks, whether in Berlin, New York, Paris, St Petersburg, or Vienna, ran their global investments through The City. London was still the financial and commercial centre of global banking. And it was colonial and imperial to the core. The great naval powers maintained coaling stations and dockyards in the world’s major oceans and ports, and viciously vied with one another for possession of even the remotest and most desolate of rock atolls. Thus, while the war had to be won or lost on the battlefields of Europe, the First World War almost from the start had an impact on the peoples especially of Africa, Asia, Australasia, India, and the Middle East. And yet, Strachan reminds us, only the German official history, Der Weltkrieg (1924–55), would use the term ‘world war’ in its title—even though its fourteen volumes did not reflect the global aspect of the war. ⁴⁶

Strachan suggests that two divergent paths dictated the ‘world’ war: while Britain and France wanted to confine the fighting to Europe so as to concentrate their resources against Germany and not to disperse them globally, Imperial Germany had every interest in doing precisely that, arousing colonial rebellions against the Entente powers in order to force them to defend their overseas possessions. On paper, the Entente had the means to defeat Germany beyond the Continent in short order, but, Strachan argues, ‘economic determinism’ in isolation is indecisive; what matters are its ‘concentration and application to the fighting fronts’. ⁴⁷ Where Britain appeared in force, it was to secure its shipping lanes—Coronel in the south Pacific and the Falkland Islands in the south Atlantic. Conversely, Germany concentrated its efforts on a peripheral strategy—trying to draw vital Entente forces away from the European theatre. Lieutenant-Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck understood this perfectly well and had written on the eve of 1914 that, should war come to Africa, Berlin ought to use German East Africa as a battleground to divert British troops from France. Much less successfully, Berlin tried to inflame the Muslim world to rebel against especially Britain, but not even an ominous Ottoman declaration of Holy War throughout the Caliphate on 14 November 1914 by the Sheik-ul-Islam ⁴⁸ had any effect on the outcome of the ‘world’ war.

In fact, at times Berlin’s ‘imperial war’ read like the pages of Alice in Wonderland as German agents, consuls, and officers carried offers of arms, gold, and even national independence to a bewildering host of rulers from Morocco to Afghanistan. ⁴⁹ And while most of these ventures were doomed to failure—after all, how were gold and guns to be shipped from Berlin to Afghanistan through the British naval blockade or across hostile Russia?—some had repercussions well after the First World War had ended. Strachan offers several examples: the 3rd Afghan War of 1919 was in part ‘pay-off’ for the German mission to Kabul in 1915; the Egyptian eviction of the British in 1922 was a ‘delayed response’ to Max von Oppenheim’s enticements to Cairo in 1914; and the Russian Civil War was partly a consequence of the German ‘repatriation’ of V.I. Lenin from Switzerland to Russia in 1917. In short, Strachan argues, many of the fault lines of the interwar period had their origins ‘less in the making of peace in 1919 than in the waging of the war in 1914–1918’. ⁵⁰ Some of those fault lines still dog us today, especially in the Middle East.

Additionally, Strachan refuses to follow the standard (and especially German) argument that the war overseas was nothing more than a British grab for the Reich’s colonies. Never one to hesitate to rethink accepted interpretations, he argues that Britain’s attacks on the German colonies and the German cruisers were not ‘part of an imperial design’, but rather a vital element of what historians now like to call ‘sub-imperialism’, that is, of the ambitions of Britain’s ‘subordinate’ semi-independent dominions. South Africa riveted its attention on German Southwest Africa. Australia coveted German New Guinea, and New Zealand desired German Samoa. Both also had their eyes on the Solomon Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Palau-Caroline-Marianas islands. And Britain’s one formal pre-war ally, Japan, lusted after German Kiaochow (Tsingtao) and the Shantung (Shandong) Province of China. For these states, Strachan writes, ‘belligerence was a passport to the peace negotiations’, where a new world order would be created. ⁵¹

Strachan focused his investigations on Africa and the World War. He does not get bogged down in the competing and bewildering Entente claims for colonies or in local African rationales for joining what was largely a ‘white man’s war’; rather, he makes his main points in his usual crisp, straightforward manner. It was a different war on the ‘Dark Continent’. First off, there was none of the ‘war enthusiasm’ exhibited in the capitals of their mother countries. Second, there were common fears among white settlers that ‘the spectacle of white fighting white would reduce the status of the Europeans’. Third, armed conflict could arouse militant passions among African tribes that had only recently been ‘crushed’. Finally, the Europeans numbers were ‘exiguous’ and their hold on recently conquered territory ‘precarious’ and ‘incomplete’. ⁵² Pacification and a certain degree even of collaboration, then, was in the best interests of the whites.

Conversely, Europeans (and especially Britain and France) looked to west Africa’s vast manpower pool as a source of reserves. Roughly 2 million Africans served in the First World War in various capacities; upwards of 200,000 died as a result. While Prime Minister David Lloyd George tried to put the blame for ‘militarizing Africa’ on the Germans, Strachan shows that the opposite was in fact true: the Entente ‘was responsible for arming the African’. The future Great War warrior Charles Mangin in his 1910 book, La force noire, had conjured up visions of a vast African manpower pool for military purposes; in reality, West Africa provided but 200,000 soldiers to France. In Africa, most combatants were not warriors, but carriers. Most were not volunteers, but impressed. And most died not in battle, but due to disease (malaria). ⁵³

The nature of the campaigns in Africa also differed from those in Europe. Highlands, savannahs, jungles, and deserts constituted the terrain. ‘Roads were few’, Strachan reminds the reader, ‘and motorized vehicles fewer’. Railway construction had only recently begun and hence much of the hinterland had to be reached with the help of draught or pack animals. The march and supply of a single company in East Africa, Lettow-Vorbeck later recalled, was akin to the movement of a division in Europe. ⁵⁴ The one bright spot in terms of survival was that there was an ‘almost total absence of artillery’. In the Cameroons, the Germans had but 14 guns of different types. Where the tsetse fly ruled out draught animals, some 300 porters were required to move a single field gun. As a result, Strachan concludes, ‘the individual was not tyrannized, as he was on the western front, by the industrialization of warfare’. ⁵⁵ In fact, the campaigns in Africa resembled nineteenth-century colonial conquest more than they did the war on the western front.

Germany’s peripheral strategy was a failure. It did not seriously threaten what Strachan called the ‘soft underbelly of the Entente’. But it did disrupt and dislocate countless African families. It undermined traditional patterns of authority—both European and indigenous. And it destroyed some of the agricultural and technological benefits that colonization had brought to parts of Africa. Only in rare cases did it trigger demands for African independence. I will leave Strachan’s conclusion, that the First World War ‘ranks alongside the slave trade in terms of its impact on Africa’, ⁵⁶ to scholars more knowledgeable in this field than I am.

Respice Finem: ‘Consider the End’

The motto of the modern Strachan Grant of Arms cited above pertains to Sir Hew in two obvious ways. Historians of the First World War are anxiously awaiting the publication of the second volume of The First World War, covering two years of industrialized warfare (1915 and 1916). We do ‘consider the end’ of a most distinguished career. The motto also pertains directly to Strachan’s views on the end and the consequences of the First World War. Concerning ‘the end’, Strachan declines to concentrate on the highly controversial 440 articles of the Treaty of Versailles (1919)—and instead looks at the broader spectrum of the treaty. It had to do two things: draw a line under the Great War and meet the expectations of a new world order associated mainly with President Woodrow Wilson’s celebrated Fourteen Points (the Lord God, the historian A.J.P. Taylor once caustically remarked, had but ten!). It largely accomplished the first but failed miserably with the second. Why? Strachan argues that the failure was not due either to the harshness or the laxness of the settlement—and there are legions of historians who will argue either side of the case—but rather the Allies’ ‘failure of resolve in implementing its terms’. And the treaty promised too much: ‘the rule of international law, the value of multilateral solutions, and the belief that liberal democracy should be the basis for progress’. In the interwar years, liberalism ‘lost the determination to enforce its own standards’ and it proved ‘reluctant to assert itself in the internal politics of states that deviated from democratic norms’. Still, Strachan refuses to see the treaty as the main cause for the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and much less for the outbreak of war in 1939. ‘There is no inevitability linking Versailles and the ambitions of the peacemakers to [the] outbreak’ of the Second World War. ⁵⁷

Regarding ‘the consequences’, Strachan reminds the reader that the First World War set not just the European, but also the global stage for the rest of the century. It toppled four empires (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, Turkey). It triggered the Russian revolution and provided the bedrock for the Soviet Union. It thrust a reluctant United States on to the world stage. It briefly revived liberalism. It brought a temporary solution to the unbridled ambitions of the Balkan states. It laid the seeds for the coming conflicts in the Middle East. ‘It was emphatically not a war without meaning or purpose’. ⁵⁸ Powerful and accurate words!

Finally, Strachan fits the First World War into the master narrative of the ‘short’ twentieth century. Beginning with the victory of the Allied and Associated Powers over the authoritarian regimes in Berlin, Constantinople, and Vienna to the triumphalist rhetoric of the post-Cold War, that narrative is simple yet bold: ‘democracy will prevail over totalitarianism’. With regard to the war of 1914–18, the democracies proved highly adept at waging major war. In Strachan’s words, they harnessed military operations to the pursuit of national objectives. They created the post of Allied generalissimo, but then also the institution of the Supreme War Council to bring even the highest military post under civilian control. ‘Ironically, democracy, by militarising itself for the duration of the war, proved better at waging war than did militarism’. Extended beyond the First World War, that narrative in ‘an ascending sequence’ accounted for the defeat of Adolf Hitler in 1945 and the collapse of Communism in 1990. The overarching Zeitgeist was as persuasive as it was seductive: ‘democratic governments, although slow to fight, fight to win’. ⁵⁹

This tongue-in-cheek jab at the well-established American civil–military narrative by a British military historian reminds one of the story of an elderly Daniel being cast into the lions’ pit by Darius the Mede (chapter 6, book of Daniel). Both Daniel and Strachan survived. And it also leads us back to Strachan’s most studied military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz: ‘Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.’ ⁶⁰