The First World War

Extract from the Foreword by Professor Hew Strachan

The First World War was fought on many fronts intensively and simultaneously. In this respect it bears direct comparison with the Second World War. In the Second World War, the relationship between fronts, and the coordination of their efforts, would be called grand strategy. But this was not a phrase known or used in 1914–1918. Most of the campaigns described in this volume were self-contained in their origins and even in their conduct. They represented national efforts made in pursuit of national goals.

In this respect the First World War became a world war because it conflated wars that had lives and directions of their own. It began in the Balkans. As such it was the third Balkan was fought in rapid succession since 1912, and in most respects the interests of the principal Balkan states in the war never ranged beyond the Balkan peninsula. Serbia, Bulgaria and Rumania all sought local objectives. The exception was the most reluctant of the Balkan belligerents, Greece, which had eyes on territory in Asia Minor. But that conflict – the one fought over the Ottoman empire – makes the same point: it too began before 1914 and it did not end in 1918. Its conclusion was reached with the establishment of modern Turkey in 1923.

Only two powers, one on each side, fully confronted the fact that they were fighting a multi-front war. Britain was of Europe but not in it; moreover it had sprawling and vulnerable global interests. These included India and a network of colonial bases between Delhi and London. Their sizeable Muslim populations were intimately affected by the fate of Islam’s Holy Cities, which lay within the Ottoman empire. The pursuit of grand strategy therefore found its more coherent form in the debates of the British cabinet as it weighed the priorities of competing commitments. At bottom these went to the most basic issues of war and peace. Should Britain introduce conscription in order to raise a mass army? Should it not concentrate on what it could do best, providing the arms and money for other powers on the European mainland to fight? The resulting discussions were frequently acrimonious, and after the war the memoirs of the participants flung accusations that made ‘easterners’ and ‘westerners’, ‘frocks’ and ‘brasshats’ terms of abuse rather than precise descriptions. In reality the categories were never that neat, and the vigour with which the various options were canvassed bore testimony to the strength, not the weakness, of democracies in effective decision-making.

Germany was more genuinely divided between ‘easterners’ and ‘westerners’, but here the casualty was strategy itself. It stood at the physical heart of Europe, and it was the mainstay of the Central Powers’ alliance. Its armies could go east or west with comparable facility, but it never found a consistent policy with which to determine their deployment. Moreover, as Peter Simkins makes clear in his contribution to this volume, by 1918 Germany’s most important voice in the war’s direction, Erich Ludendorff, had lost his way, By then its allies were critically dependent on Berlin not only for weapons and money, but also for military advice and leadership.