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First World War Studies

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The First World War as a global war

Hew Strachana a All Souls College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Online publication date: 30 April 2010

To cite this Article Strachan, Hew(2010) 'The First World War as a global war', First World War Studies, 1: 1, 3 14 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/19475021003621036 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19475021003621036

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First World War Studies Vol. 1, No. 1, March 2010, 314

The First World War as a global war

Hew Strachan*
All Souls College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

This article discusses the widening of the First World War from a European war to a global war and what that meant for the participants. Todays politicians, who talk (albeit tautologically) of an increasingly globalized world, forget how already globalized the world seemed in 1914, especially if you happened to live in London. The fact that the First World War was a global war was itself the product of a global order, shaped by the European great powers and held together by an embryonic economic system. The title the world war was a statement about its importance, not a statement about its geographical scale. And yet the French and British ocial histories, unlike the German, did not use world war in their titles, any more than they had used the phrase during the war itself. They preferred the title the Great War, and in English the war only became widely known as the First World War after 1945, in other words after there had been a Second World War. The article explores the implications of the title the Great War and the idea that the war of 19141918 was a great European war (a name also used in Britain, especially during the war itself). The article also examines the role of nances in the widening of the war and the global economy during a worldwide conict. It also discusses the role of empires in the expanding war. However, the nancial situation of participants, including those who entered the war at a later date, and the desire for empire were not the only factors in the creation of a global conict. Decisions made in the interest of individual nations also had an eect on the widening of the war from a regional dispute. The corollary of the articles argument, that the First World War was in some respects an aggregation of regional conicts, was that the war would not simply end when the European war ended. All that was agreed on 11 November 1918 was the surrender of Germany, largely on terms which reected the situation within Europe and specically on the western front. Only here did the guns fell silent at 11am on that day. However, so imperative were the immediate demands of the conict that there was scant consideration of their long-term eects. Some of the consequences of the fact that the First World War was waged as a global war remained with Europe throughout the Cold War, and others remain in the Middle East to this day. Keywords: global war; economics; empire; neutrality

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H.M. Tomlinson was a patriot but also a pacist, a man who reported on the war from the Western Front and in 1917 became the literary editor of The Nation. In 1930 his war novel, All our Yesterdays, was reprinted three times within a month of

*Email: hew.strachan@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
ISSN 1947-5020 print/ISSN 1947-5039 online 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/19475021003621036 http://www.informaworld.com

H. Strachan

its publication. The book has not entered the canon of First World War literature. Tomlinsons prose is wordy and contrived. His characters, in Cyril Fallss apt criticism, do not live except while under the narrators eyes and through his eyes.1 And yet, in his critical guide to war books, Falls called All our Yesterdays a very ne book, and according it two stars in a classication system that ranked it alongside A.P. Herberts The Secret Battle and, somewhat less excusably, Ford Madox Fords magnicent Tietjens tetralogy, Parades End. All our Yesterdays was designed to show how the war had cut across the lives of British lives in the rst quarter of the twentieth century. The rst of its ve parts is entitled 1900, and the book does not reach what it calls War! until the fourth. Tomlinson had been born in the east end of London, had worked as a shipping clerk, and had rst found literary success with his account of a journey up the Amazon, The Sea and the Jungle, published in 1912. These biographical elements found their places in All our Yesterdays, and in Chapter 8 of Book 4 Tomlinson as a Londoner whose living and experience of life were shaped by the Citys global and maritime interests provided a tour dhorizon of the strategic situation at the end of 1914:
Russians were hurling Kurds from the slopes of Mount Ararat. And at Basra, that port for which Sinbad had set sail, Sikhs had arrived from the Punjab, and Gurkhas from the Himalayas; and these men, moved by the new zeal which would free us from the tyranny of obsolete and ruinous dogmas, and led by young men from English public schools, marched to dislodge Ottomans who were entrenched in the Garden of Eden. The coconut groves of New Guinea were stormed by Australians. In those days, while steaming at sunset under the snows of the Andes, British ships were sunk by their foes; who, but little later, were sunk by British warships o the Falkland Islands. Merchant vessels and their cargoes foundered in the Bay of Bengal and o the Cape of Good Hope through the explosions of torpedoes. It might have been thought that Penang, that city of light and colour with its smell of spices, would have remained inviolate, if only because it was on the Strait of Malacca, yet a German cruiser appeared there one day, scattered its anchorage with smoking wreckage, and vanished again, leaving on the waters the bodies of a number of Japanese girls, which had oated out of a sunken Russian cruiser.
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There is more in the same vein, as Tomlinson employs irony to describe the mutiny of Indian troops in Singapore and the Germans determination to hold Shantung against the Japanese. Then he concludes:
It was already becoming clear for the rst time to many onlookers that the earth was not two hemispheres as we had thought, but one simple and responsive ball, and that happenings on the shores of the Yellow Sea and elsewhere may cause disturbing noises even in Washington.2

Todays politicians, who talk (albeit tautologically) of an increasingly globalized world, forget how already globalized the world seemed in 1914, especially if you happened to live in London. The fact that the First World War was a global war was itself the product of a global order, shaped by the European great powers and held together by an embryonic economic system. By 1930 Tomlinsons evocation of the repercussions felt in Asia and the Pacic within four months of the outbreak of a war whose epicentre lay in south-eastern Europe should, to that extent, have been a statement of the obvious. But it was not. True, the literature of warning written before 1914, particularly works published in Germany, spoke of the coming conict as the world war, Der

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Weltkrieg.3 The policy of Weltpolitik or world policy, embraced by Germanys penultimate pre-war chancellor, Bernhard von Bu low, argued that his countrys great power status was conditional on its standing in the wider world, and led the German admiralty sta to speak of world war in 1905.4 In Vienna, Franz Conrad von Ho tzendor, the chief of the Austro-Hungarian general sta, had an audience with the emperor, Franz Josef, in January 1913, in which he presented the annual report for 1912 of the governor of BosniaHerzegovina, Oskar Potiorek. Conrad took the opportunity, not for the rst time, to advocate a preventive war with Serbia, but the emperor told him that he feared Russia above all and that, if there were war with Serbia, a wider conict would follow. Franz Josef described this war as a Weltkrieg.5 In Berlin four months later, on 24 April 1913, Bu lows successor as chancellor, Theodor von Bethmann Hollweg, said he would do all he could to avoid war, but If there is a war, it will be a world war [einen Weltkrieg], and we must wage it on two fronts . . . It will be a war for survival [ein Existenzkampf].6 That is really the point. The title the world war was a statement about its importance, not a statement about its geographical scale. It would be a war for the very existence of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. In each of these cases, those who spoke of the threat of world war did so for rhetorical eect, rather than in order to clarify a planning assumption. German naval ocers may have anticipated a world war, but Alfred von Tirpitz, the head of the Reichs naval armaments oce, built a German eet designed overwhelmingly for operations in the North Sea. He neglected the construction of cruisers for oceanic war despite the Kaisers wishes. When Conrad advocated war with Serbia, he was envisaging a limited war to reassert the empires authority in the Balkans. After the crisis broke in July 1914, he was almost wilful in his disregard of the danger that a Balkan war would become a European war and a European war a world war. Finally, even Bethmann Hollwegs statement spoke only of a two-front war, a war waged simultaneously against France and Russia. He did not mention a third front, a war to the south with Italy or in the Balkans, or a war at sea, let alone war in Africa or the Far East. After the war was over, the German ocial history, published by the Reichsarchiv, was called Der Weltkrieg, and yet its contents did not reect the title. An account of military operations on land only, and separate from those series devoted to the war at sea and in the air, its attention to the fronts outside Europe was eeting.7 There is a paradox here. The equivalent series in France and Britain have much less grandiloquent titles and yet range much further geographically. Les Armees Franc aises dans la Grande Guerre allocated a whole volume to the war in the Cameroons. The British ocial history, given the overall title of the Ocial History of the Great War, devoted four volumes of its series on the land war, Military Operations, to Mesopotamia; one to the Cameroons; three to Egypt and Palestine; two to Gallipoli, and one (with a further volume planned but never completed) to East Africa.8 And yet the French and British ocial histories, unlike the German, did not use world war in their titles, any more than they had used the phrase during the war itself. They preferred the title the Great War, and in English the war only became widely known as the First World War after 1945, in ` Court other words after there had been a Second World War. Admittedly Charles a Repington, the military correspondent of The Times, chose in 1920 to call his war memoirs The First World War 19141918, but his motivation (which he did not explain, but certainly included a desire to provoke) appears to have been his

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frustration with the peace settlement rather than a determination to reect the global shape of the war itself. The French, even today, are as likely to call the First World War la grande guerre as they are to call it la premie`re guerre mondiale. Implicit in the title the Great War is the idea that the war of 19141918 was a great European war (a name also used in Britain, especially during the war itself). Such a description carried the connotation of a civil war between civilized nations, united by Christianity and capitalism, an act of collective folly which would result in their losing their primacy in the world to the United States. According to this view, Tomlinson was wrong: the First World War did not become a world war in 1914, but in 1917, when the United States entered it and when Russia, by dint of its revolutions, left. In the same way the Second World War can be seen as a European war between 1939 and 1941, and only became a world war when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December of the same year.9 This, however, is history written with hindsight, shaped by the Cold War, and by the knowledge that the legacy of 1917 and 1941 would be a prolonged stand-o between the United States and the Soviet Union. In fact, Tomlinson was right. In 1914 Europe was the centre of the world, and as soon as AustriaHungarys war with Serbia could no longer be limited to the Balkans it would become a world war, and not just a European one. This line of thinking produces the somewhat paradoxical notion that the ancient and doddery Franz Josef, in recognizing this danger in 1913, showed himself to be one of the more far-sighted statesmen of 1914. However, the emperor probably did not know why he was right, whereas H.M. Tomlinson did. Europe was the centre of the world in 1914 for two reasons, neither of which was necessarily of paramount consideration to the emperor or even to AustriaHungary: the rst was nancial and commercial, and the second colonial and imperial. In July 1914, 59 countries were on the gold standard. In other words, they used gold coin or backed their paper money with a set percentage of gold, and they determined a gold value for their currency and guaranteed its convertibility. During major crises, the central banks of the leading nations cooperated. In 1907, in a crisis which reminds us that the nancial storm of 2009 has many more precedents than that of 1929, the Banque de France and the Reichsbank in Germany drew on their gold reserves to support the Bank of England, caught by heavy American borrowing. Both banks pushed up their interest rates to increase their gold stocks, while trying to prevent the ow of gold to the United States. What was important in the 1907 crisis was the behaviour of the Bank of England. Unlike the central banks of France and Germany, it did not build up its gold reserves, preferring to use gold rather than to hoard it. It could do that because it was the centre of the worlds money and insurance markets. Its strength was its liquidity. By 1910 the United States may have held 31% of the worlds gold reserves, but it still nanced its trade through London. Therefore the gold standard worked because it was in reality a sterling exchange system, with the worlds commerce revolving around the pound sterling. The centrality of the pound to international exchanges and to world markets made Britains entry to the First World War of paramount importance.10 When Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, told the House of Commons on the afternoon of 3 August 1914 that Britain was on the brink of war, he stressed that as a commercial and maritime nation Britain would be so aected by war in Europe that it would be little worse o if it became a belligerent than if it

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remained a neutral. He imagined a war fought, at least from the British perspective, almost entirely at sea; he did not anticipate Britain raising a mass army for service on the continent of Europe. Britains economic position pivoted on the City of London, the shipping industry in which Tomlinson had worked, and its balance of trade. Indeed, in the eyes of Asquiths Liberal cabinet these were the principal strengths which Britain could contribute to the Ententes war eort. By the same token, when Britain became a belligerent, every country in the world was aected. Those who were Britains enemies were progressively cut o from overseas trade by the naval blockade. Despite being the worlds second largest industrial power by 1914, Germany could only export or import to those neutrals on its immediate borders. It was unable to access international money markets, particularly that of New York, despite strong pro-German sentiment in at least some parts of the United States.11 Those who were Britains allies found that their access to the same money markets, and so to the borrowing required to pay for the overseas imports which they needed to equip their war eorts, depended on Britains international credit-worthiness, and on the sterlingdollar exchange rate. From the wars onset, Russia could not raise funds in the United States, but Britain could. By 1916 Britain had become the vehicle by which France and Italy too raised funds in America. Finally, those who remained neutral found that their wealth and trade were increasingly compromised by the war because of the power of the sterlingdollar relationship and because of the capacity of Britain to keep its shipping and insurance business active despite hostilities. Neutrality proved to be relative, not absolute. This was particularly true of the principal neutral, the United States. The United States may have been a late entrant to the war, but from its outset in 1914 Americas recovery from depression was achieved on the back of orders from the Entente powers. Britain sold treasury bonds to American private investors, using J.P. Morgan as its agents. Much of the nance so raised was then used to maintain the sterlingdollar exchange rate so as to control the prices of goods from the United States. So heavily had the private investors of the United States sunk their resources in Allied debt that on 28 November 1916 the Federal Reserve Board, temporarily dominated by pro-German and neutral sentiment, warned them that they were speculating too heavily on an Entente victory. By then, two-fths of Britains daily spending on the war was directed to the United States, and it was reckoned that ve-sixths of British expenditure over the next six months would have to be funded by loans, mostly raised on the New York stock market. Britain was eectively spending money in the United States which was then borrowed back to be spent in the United States again. Moreover, it was doing so not only on its own account but also on those of its allies, France, Russia and Italy. The Federal Reserve Boards warning created a crisis in Allied nances that was only resolved (and even then not fully so) by the entry of the United States to the war in 1917.12 Britains entry to the war in 1914 therefore meant that nance and trade were aected globally, whether a state was belligerent or not, and Britains adoption of economic warfare only underlined this point. But the implications were also more narrowly strategic. Each of the Entente powers, Russia, France and especially Britain, were colonial powers. As a result of their entering the war, all Africa, save Ethiopia and Liberia, much of Asia, eectively all of Australasia, and parts of the Americas also found themselves at war.

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For the imperial powers themselves, empire implied resources, especially of manpower. Nowhere was this more true than of France, confronted with a falling population and obsessed accordingly with pro-natalism. In the years leading up to the outbreak of war, in order to match the size of the German army, France had to call up over 80% of its adult male population, whereas its rival could keep pace by conscripting only 57%. In 1910, General Charles Mangin had proposed raising an army from French Equatorial Africa, la force noire, in addition to the units already formed in French North Africa and Indo-China. By the end of the war France had raised 200,000 men from West Africa alone, and 550,000 from the empire as a whole, of whom 440,000 served in Europe.13 In 1914 Britains biggest army was not at home but in India. While Britain prepared one expeditionary force in August, India formed four one each for Europe, Egypt, Mesopotamia and East Africa. India raised 1.4 million soldiers during the war, of whom 1.1 million served outside the subcontinent. Furthermore, some argue that by 1917 Britains crack ghting units in France came from the white dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser extent South Africa. Together they contributed 1.2 million men, of whom 900,000 served in Europe.14 Finally, Russia raised 15 million men in the war, the largest number of any belligerent, even if that gure only represented 39% of its population of military age. To raise less than half that total, France had to take twice that percentage. While it seems reasonable to conclude that the Russian army was predominantly European in its ethnic composition, there is no reason to suggest that it was exclusively so. In terms of resources, the Entente had the global capacity to defeat the Central Powers in short order.15 But economic determinism is, in isolation, a poor tool for explaining battleeld outcomes. The keys to unlocking this capacity were, rst, its mobilization and, second, its concentration and application to the ghting fronts where they would be most eective. Strategically, therefore, neither France nor Britain had an interest in the war becoming global. They called it the Great War, not the world war, precisely because they needed to conne its ghting to Europe. If the war was widened, then their resources would be dispersed, not concentrated; they would have to defend their colonies, not attack Germany. The war at sea provides an obvious illustration of this point. The Royal Navys principal battles of 1914, to which Tomlinson referred (albeit somewhat elliptically), were fought not in the North Sea, but in the south Pacic at Coronel and, decisively, in the south Atlantic, o the Falkland islands. They were designed to remove the German cruiser threat to the worlds shipping lanes, and so secure Britains ability to tap into the worlds markets. Britains conduct of the war on land reinforces the argument. On 5 August 1914 a subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence met to consider what to do with British land forces both within Europe and outside it. Its aim outside Europe was denial to close down Germanys ability to use its African and Pacic colonies as bases for oensive operations designed to widen the war, to prevent the use of their ports by German cruisers, and to break up the German global wireless network radiating out from Nauen that would coordinate the actions of those cruisers. Britains attacks on German colonies in 1914 were not part of an imperialist design, a manifestation of a Fischer-like war aims agenda or a fullment of the socialists pre-1914 expectation that, if war came, it would be a war of imperialism. If war aims fuelled the overseas campaigns that Britain fought in 191415, they were inspired by so-called sub-imperialism, the ambitions not of

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Britain but of its subordinate dominions. Australia and New Zealand had eyes on New Guinea and Samoa in the south Pacic, and South Africa hoped to expand into Namibia and up to the Zambezi. Territorial concessions were the price of their loyalty to London, not of any ambitions for an even larger post-war empire entertained in Whitehall. By the same token, the Central Powers had an interest in widening the war, precisely to draw Entente forces away from Europe. This was a particular focus for the war between Germany and Britain. In German East Africa, Paul von Lettow Vorbeck, who had arrived as the military commander at the beginning of 1914, argued in a memorandum of 15 May 1914 that, if there were war, then the ghting in East Africa should be treated not as a self-sucient episode but made to interact with the great war in Europe. Lettows aim, in a campaign sustained throughout 19141918, was not colonial (indeed, his conduct of the war devastated the German colony), but military: to use East Africa as a war zone so as to divert British resources from the main theatre of operations.16 The most dramatic illustration of this point was Germanys alliance with the Ottoman empire. On 13 March 1914, Helmuth von Moltke the younger, chief of the Prussian general sta, wrote to Conrad, his Austro-Hungarian counterpart:
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Turkey is militarily a nonentity! The reports of our military mission sound desperate. The state of the army is ridiculed in every report. If Turkey was previously described as a sick man, now we must speak of it as a dying one. It has no life force left, and nds itself beyond saving as it enters its nal agony. Our military mission is like a medical board, whose doctors stand by the death bed of an incurable invalid.17

That was Wilhelm IIs view, too. But Britains attitude to the July crisis changed everything. On 30 July 1914, the Kaiser announced that our consuls in Turkey and India . . . must iname the whole Muslim world to rebel against this hated, treacherous and ignorant nation of criminals; if we are going to shed our blood, then England must at least lose India.18 This demand would culminate with the declaration of Holy War by the Caliphate on 14 November 1914, summoning Muslims to rise specically against British, French, Russian, Serb and Montenegrin rule, but not German or Austro-Hungarian.19 Moltke too changed his tune. What he had inherited from his predecessor as chief of the general sta, Alfred von Schlieen, was a plan for a short campaign within Europe, but what he faced was the need to wage a long war that embraced the world. This war, he remarked to his adjutant, Hans von Haeften, shortly after midnight on 3031 July 1914, will grow into a world war in which England will also intervene. Few can have an idea of the extent, the duration and the end of this war.20 He had warned the Kaiser of as much when he was identied as Schlieens successor almost 10 years before,21 but now he had to do something about it. He was particularly worried about the Eastern Front, where the German army seemed too weak to prevent a Russian invasion. Both he and his predecessor had somewhat blithely assumed that their Austro-Hungarian ally would pull the main weight of the Russian army south towards Galicia, although neither of them had any faith in the capacity of the Austro-Hungarian army to do so. Accordingly, on 5 August 1914 he called for an Islamic revolution in the Caucasus. War in the Caucasus would at the very least prevent Russia from deploying units from there to the Central Powers Eastern Front (or the Russians Western Front), and at best might even pull Russian units from East Prussia and Galicia to the Caucasus. The alliance with Turkey was agreed

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by Germany on 2 August 1914 and by AustriaHungary on 5 August. Both imagined that the Ottoman army would attack in the Caucasus so as to lure Russian troops south and east. On 20 August 1914, Moltke added in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Afghanistan; now Islamic revolution had become the means to enable Germany to attack French North Africa and to stoke war on the north-west frontier of British India. The Ottoman empire had become the land bridge by which Germany escaped its encirclement within Europe. Germany needed all its troops and munitions in Europe, and the only instruments available to it with which to implement this expanding strategy were diplomatic. Even if it could not transport an army down the Danube to Istanbul, and thence to Anatolia, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, it could at least send agents and consuls. They brought promises, not only of arms but also of gold and even of national independence. Turkey apart, most local rulers were canny enough to bide their time, waiting for the promises to gain substance, and prudent enough to play one side o against another. The Entente found itself with an extra theatre of war, but it was one which militarily it was able to contain. German diplomacy had widened the war, and it threatened to widen it further. The globalization of what had begun as a Balkan war was not just due to nance and empire, or to the AngloGerman antagonism. None of these pressures explains why Turkey fell in with Germanys plans, nor why it resisted pressure from Britain and France to stay out of the war. The Ottoman empire had just lost most of the remaining vestiges of its European territory; it was deeply in debt, and it was wracked by domestic turmoil, suering a succession of coups and counter-coups. These were good reasons for not compounding its problems by entering a major war, and it certainly had no interest in becoming a tool of German ambitions. But such factors added to the attractions of an ally that seemed to harbour few expansionist designs within the Ottomans own sphere of interest, and which had suddenly become ready to treat them seriously in a way that the other European powers had not. Turkey entered the First World War because its government, or, to be more exact, elements within its government, concluded that it suited Turkeys needs to do so. What Turkeys decision reects is that, once war broke out in Europe at the end of July 1914, a whole series of regional conicts and latent antagonisms attached themselves to the central conict and, by doing so, widened it. Turkey did not care about developments in France or in East Prussia, and it did not wish to be the tool of Germanys strategy for widening the war. It agreed to the alliance with the Central Powers because it needed to recover its own position and status. It regarded both the Caucasus and Egypt as falling within its own territorial orbit, as elements of the Ottoman empire. Thus there was a short-term convergence between Germanys wider aims against Russia and Britain and Turkeys nearer goals. Moreover, the Ottoman empire needed an alliance to secure its standing in the Aegean and to recover it in the Balkans. Like AustriaHungary and Bulgaria, it wished to overthrow the verdict of the Balkan wars of 19121913. On this reading, an alliance with the Central Powers was a means to create a fresh Balkan bloc that would include Bulgaria and Romania and isolate Greece. Other later entrants to the war pursued similar regional ambitions, which also piggybacked on to the original war but did not share its motivations. The universalism of the rhetoric espoused with such speed by the original belligerents, the claim that this was a war for Kultur, for civilization, for the rights of small nations

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and international law, found little echo amid the more obviously self-interested and territorial motivations of those who followed. Italy entered the war in 1915 to further its local ambitions in Austro-Hungarian Slovenia; Bulgaria and Romania also aimed to expand their frontiers at the expense of their immediate neighbours when they joined the war on opposing sides in 1915 and 1916. Both Japan and Portugal responded to the outbreak of war with concerns that were specically extraEuropean. Japan exploited the Anglo-Japanese alliance in August 1914 precisely to further its territorial ambitions in China and the Pacic. Its contribution to the war in Europe was conned to a naval otilla, reluctantly deployed in 1917 to the Mediterranean. Portugal, worried that the outcome of the war would see it lose its African colonies, was anxious to ght precisely to secure them. Britain resisted this pressure until 1916, trying to contain Portugals involvement to Angola and Mozambique, but in 1916 Portugal requisitioned the shipping of the Central Powers that had been interned in its ports in 1914, and so provoked the latter into open hostilities. These regional interests stacked up and, as they did so, so their pressures became mutually reinforcing, especially after the United States entry, which brought in its wake allies such as China and a clutch of South American states. Their military contributions were negligible, but they, like Japan and Portugal, recognized that this war was now so big that they could better protect their interests by ghting than by not doing so. Belligerence was a passport to the peace negotiations, which seemed likely to create a new world order. The corollary of this argument, that the First World War was in some respects an aggregation of regional conicts, was that the war would not simply end when the European war ended. All that was agreed on 11 November 1918 was the surrender of Germany, largely on terms that reected the situation within Europe and specically on the Western Front. Only here did the guns fall silent at 11 am on that day. They had already done so on the Macedonian, Italian and Palestinian fronts, in a series of independent settlements with Bulgaria, Austria (but not Hungary, which did not agree terms until 13 November), and Turkey. However, other regional conicts persisted. The collapse of four empires, those of Russia, Turkey, AustriaHungary, and Germany, also meant that new ones emerged, including wars between the Czechs and Hungarians, the Hungarians and Romanians, and the Poles and Russians. Some reected the resumption of older antagonisms, for example that between the Greeks and Turks. The British Chief of the Imperial General Sta, Sir Henry Wilson, wrote to Lord Esher on 14 November 1919: It is again pathetic to realise that one year and three days after the Armistice we have between 20 and 30 wars raging in dierent parts of the world.22 War had bred war, and this was true in a very direct way. Some of the wars that so irked Wilson were the ongoing eects of the strategies which the Central Powers had adopted during hostilities precisely because of their desire to widen the First World War. The 3rd Afghan War of 1919 can be seen as the pay-o for the German mission to Afghanistan in 1915. The emir, Habibullah, had played a long and circumspect hand, despite pressure from his more intemperate and pro-German brother, Nasrullah. In February 1919 Nasrullah assassinated Habibullah and led his country into a war with British India. In 1922 Egypt threw o British rule, in a similarly delayed response to German agitation, which had been orchestrated in 1914 by Max von Oppenheim. And the biggest of the wars that still raged in late 1919, the Russian Civil War, could on one reading be seen as the consequence of Germanys readiness to help Lenin get back from Switzerland to Russia in 1917, precisely

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because of Berlins determination to promote internal division the better to prosecute the First World War. It has been fashionable to see the treaty of Versailles and its attendant agreements as a cause of the Second World War. This reading blames both the idealism of Woodrow Wilson and the punitive terms demanded of Germany by the Allies for the idea that the two world wars were both German wars, and that the years 19191939 can be seen as nothing other than a prolonged armistice.23 But the peacemakers of 1919, and pre-eminently Wilson himself, were trying to make peace, not war. Their focus may have been European more than it was global, but their ambitions, as manifested in the League of Nations, possessed a universality that was global in its aspiration. Many of the fault lines that dogged the inter-war years found their origins less in the making of the peace in 1919 than in the waging of the war in 19141918. It was to wage war that the Entente condoned Japans ambitions in China in 19141915, and it was to pursue those that Japan broke with the League of Nations and in 1937 attacked China, so beginning the Second World War. It was also to wage war that Germany sought the alliance with the Ottoman empire and so set in train the events that led Britain (also through its need to wage war) to make contradictory promises in the Middle East to the French and the Arabs. It was also the better to wage war that the generals of the Russian army colluded in the fall of the Tsar in March 1917, so in turn enabling Germany the more eectively to employ its own strategy of promoting revolution as a means to wage war. In all these cases, so imperative were the immediate demands of the conict that there was scant consideration of their long-term eects. Some of the consequences of the fact that the First World War was waged as a global war remained with Europe throughout the Cold War, and others remain in the Middle East to this day.

Notes
1. 2. Falls 1930, 299. Tomlinson 1930, 3401. This essay was rst delivered as a lecture at a symposium held in Vienna on 7 November 2009 to mark the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Austrian Republic, 19181920: der Fall der Imperien und der Traum einer besseren Welt, and I am grateful to Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner of the Verein fu r Geschichte der Arbeiterwegung for their invitation and inspiration. Since then it has had outings as a seminar paper at Victoria University Wellington and St Andrews University, and it was the keynote lecture at the 2009 conference of the International Society for First World War Studies; I am grateful for the questions and comments raised on all these occasions. Clarke 1997, for examples of the genre; see also Echevarria 2007 and Du ler 1994. Herwig 1991, 281. Jerabek 1991, 100. Schulte 1980, 116. Po hlmann 2002; there seems little sense that the title of the series was ever seriously debated. Green 2003; again, the title does not seem to have debated. For this sort of thinking, see Lukacs 1977. See de Cecco 1984, 11521; Eichengreen 1992, 39, 2966. See Frey 1994, 32753; Knauss 1923 remains useful, here 734. The essential work on this is Burk 1985, 8093; see also Nouailhat 1979, 37382; Cooper 1976, 20930. Michel 1982, 214, 404. War Oce 1922, 363, 37984. A point that forms a key theme of Ferguson 1998, 248318.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. Boell 1951, 23. Mu hlmann 1942, 22; see also Wallach 1976. Gehrke 1960, vol. 1, 1. Lewis 1977. Mombauer 2001, 206. von Moltke 1922, 308. Jeery 1985, 133. For this sort of thinking, see Bobbitt 2002; Goodspeed 1978.

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