The First World War

Chapter 9, “The Breaking of Armies,” begins in 1917, finding the European battlefields not significant different from how they looked two years prior. Life went on with surprising normality on the Allied front, while the Germans oversaw an austere war economy. New military leaders took command in Britain, France, Germany, and Russia, but today these leaders seem either callous or malicious, sending their troops to die by the countless thousands while they partook in long naps and sumptuous meals. Not everything can be chalked up to the incompetence of generals, as it was simply impossible to coordinate among forces in the way that subsequent technology like radio and satellites would allow, and the methods they had often broke down, making it impossible to develop a complete and accurate picture of the battlefront. Several efforts to improvise or innovate a way to achieve a breakthrough could not disrupt basic technological realities. Such explanations, however valid, were little consolation to the average soldier, and the mood was especially dark in France, even as its domestic economy adjusted to wartime conditions, whereas morale in Germany remained strong even as the quality of civilian life deteriorated. In Austria, the death of the emperor Franz Joseph in 1916 removed a rare source of unity among its patchwork of ethnicities, and in Britain the devastating losses suffered by volunteers at the Somme forced them at last to adopt conscription.