From limited war to total war

In 1914 much of the vocabulary anticipating war suggested total war – Weltkrieg; Existenzkampf. But much initial policy sought to limit war: Austria-Hungary proposed a limited war against Serbia; Bethmann-Hollweg hoped for a Kabinettskrieg (see Zechlin and Jarausch – in contrast to Fischer); Sir Edward Grey told the House of Commons that Britain’s war would only be maritime.

Historians writing about the origins of the First World War, influenced by hindsight, over-emphasise the literature evoking apocalyptical visions of war and under-play the evidence for thinking about limited war before 1914. It includes: the growth of international law from 1856 onwards, with its stress on non-combatant immunity, the rights of prisoners of war, etc; the distinctions made by colonial powers between what they called ‘savage’ war fought in their empires and ‘civilised’ war waged within Europe.

The trend to limit war did not simply evaporate in 1914. Debates over international law intensified (see Hull); the accusations that the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian armies committed atrocities in 1914 reflected an expectation that they would not (Reiss, Horne and Kramer, Watson, et al); the war aims used to woo later entrants to the war reflected their geographical ambitions and so also set constraints on their reach; and even a major battle in 1916, Verdun, was waged by both sides in ways chosen to contain it in terms of length of front and of manpower. However, the argument that the belligerents wanted to limit the war in 1916 is in danger of becoming a reductio ad absurdum. The war by then had passed a point of no return: the idea of limited war had little purchase. What caused this shift?

First, the reintegration of revolution within war. In 1815, Metternich and others attributed 20 years of European war to the French Revolution, and so sought to curb revolution to prevent war. In 1848 revolutions did not precipitate war (except for Hungary), and therefore the fear of revolution declined. Wars associated with revolution were given separate labels to remove them from mainstream, inter-state war, most obviously the American Civil War. In 1871 and 1905 revolution in France and Russia followed war, rather than precipitated it, and even then these were more exceptions than rules. The defeat of 1866 prompted the Ausgleich, not a revolution.

As a result, although the views of some statesmen in July 1914 recognised the dangers of revolution (Tsar Nicholas ,BethmannHollweg), they disregarded them in the rush to war. The commitment and relief surrounding national unit, the union sacré or the Burgfrieden, showed the awareness that the opposite might have happened, that peoples and nations might have been divided by the war. Governments responded to this recognition by immediately trying to foment revolution in their opponents. The Kaiser led the call to promote revolution within the British empire, and Germany supported insurgency in Ireland in 1916 and Russia in 1917. The Royal Navy thought blockade could cause revolution within Germany and the British government promoted an Arab revolt in the Ottoman empire from 1914. By 1918 Britain was ready to follow the US in recognising the national aspirations of many of the nationalities of the Habsburg empire, so promoting its collapse from within.

Revolution spawned fear of the enemy at home. It reintroduced the practices of guerrilla war to major war, in the Balkans and further east. It destroyed any hope that, as in 1815, the old world could be ‘restored’; the peace settlement of 1919 had to embrace dramatic change not just to prevent a recurrence of war but also to take back the moral high-ground from the Bolsheviks. Woodrow Wilson was fighting to make the world safe for democracy: that was an aim that could not permit compromise.

Total war might seem to have arisen from the combination of scientific and technological innovation with industrialisation, and disseminated by industrialisation and economic mobilisation. And so in some ways it did. The use of gas and heavy artillery at the front; the bombing of cities from the air: these were developments anticipated in the pre-1914 literature of warning. However, the principal drivers of total war were political and ideological. Although in France the rhetoric of total war harked back to the terror of the French revolution, its proponents now lay more on the radical right than on the left, as both Léon Daudet’s La guerre totale (1918) and Erich Ludendorff’s DerTotale Krieg (1935) suggested.