Anystate that is involved in a struggle for its survival must use, with utmostenergy, all its forces and resources if it wants to live up to its highestduties.’23 The number of Germany’s enemies, he added, had now become‘so great that it could become our inescapable duty’ to use ‘in certain cases’and from the first moment every available soldier. Thenceforth everythingdepended ‘on our winning the first battles’

the spectre of ‘encirclement’ tookroot in the thinking of the German general staff and of the Kaiser.

In 1907 Britain and Russia had settled their longstanding differences inAfghanistan, which had facilitated the formation of the Triple Entente ofFrance, Britain and Russia

f course, Ballin was alsoopposed to a continuation of the Anglo-German naval arms race because hefeared a further escalation of tensions that the building of battleships hadalready produced.

At thesame time, he continued to hope that increasing the social insurance benefitsthat Bismarck had first introduced in the 1880s would woo the industrialworkers away from the Social Democrats and the Social Democratic tradeunions.

Faced with the failure of the disarmament talks(largely because Germany refused to be part of any armament reduction)and with the need to fulfil election promises, the Liberal Cabinet decidedto finance both stepped-up naval armaments and social programmes

When Tirpitz, unwilling to concede that his ambitious plan was failing, alsobegan to build dreadnoughts, Fisher stepped up the building tempo

oroccan test proved to be a very bad miscalculation, and theinternational conference that followed left Germany without the gains she hadexpected

Britain began to wonder about the relentless building tempoacross the Channel, and concluded the Entente Cordiale with France,Germany’s arch-enemy on the continent. It was not quite as solid as theFranco-Russian alliance treaty of 1893 that would involve Germany in a night-marish war on two fronts. But the Entente of 1904 rattled the German ForeignOffice and caused it to test its firmness by challenging France in North Africa ayear later.

‘danger zone’, as he called it, that the ImperialNavy would be passing through. For, if London discovered the ultimate aims,it was likely that it would try to destroy the embryonic Imperial Navy in acoup reminiscent of the preventive strike Britain had launched against theDanish fleet in 1805 outside Copenhagen

the building tempo looked quite modest in its early stagesand was therefore unlikely to alarm the Royal Navy. In other words, atthe turn of the century Germany started a unilateral arms build-up againstBritain, and Germany’s long-term ambition of defeating the Royal Navyhad to be kept secret

By 1897, Tirpitz, by now the Kaiser’s naval secretary, had opted for thelatter strategy. He was convinced that the only way to gain sufficient power-political leverage against Britain, the first sea power, was to expand thehitherto modest Imperial Navy into a major tool that could be used towring territorial concessions from the British at the conference table whenanother ‘division of the world’ was being negotiate

During the late nineteenth century, the Great Powers on the Europeancontinent eyed the armament policies of their rivals with much suspicion.Perhaps one of them would achieve military superiority and then use thisadvantage to start a preventive war.

To him, major wars among Great Powers had become a loss for allparticipants, even for those who formally won, and the drain on resourceswould be so great that the region might never recover.

It containeddisturbingly accurate descriptions of what this war would be like, i.e., a massslaughter of the kind that occurred for real in the trenches of the First WorldWar. War between industrialised nations was for him tantamount to thedestruction of civil and civilised society.

However, for reasons to be examined below, from around 1910 the businesscommunities on both sides of the Atlantic became increasingly nervousabout the international diplomatic and military situation

Colonialism was dangerous and, indeed, self-defeating in the sense that itexacerbated economic tensions and rivalries that were inherent in theeconomic systems of an increasingly industrialised Europe

heviolence practised in this war became part of German military culture.8 Inother words, it became so deeply ingrained in the ethos of the officer corpsthat it came to see a future European war in the same terms of completeannihilation

imperialism was designed to draw all classes together in defence of the nationand empire and aimed to prove to the least well-to-do class that its interestswere inseparable from those of the nation. It aimed at undermining theargument of the socialists and demonstrating that, contrary to the Marxistallegation, the workers had more to lose than their chains.’

This expansion, he added, was necessary ‘to no small degree alsobecause the great patriotic task and the economic benefits to be derived fromit will offer a strong palliative against educated and uneducated SocialDemocrats’

The notion that imperialism was a useful tool not only to respond tocommercial pressures but also to divert and ease domestic tensions and topromise material gains for more than a few businessmen involved in interna-tional trade, had by the 1890s become popular among politicians and intellec-tuals all over Europe

There was yet another device by which – so politicians calculated – patrioticpride and support for the national state could be fostered: the lure of expan-sion into overseas territories and the quest for a colonial empire

A third method was to mobilise nationalist feelings and to win over citizensby appealing to the integrating force of patriotism.

theyall were faced with growing numbers of citizens living in the cities underconditions that were crying out for improvement. Perceiving a threat to theestablished order, politicians and bureaucrats relied on and refined severalmeans by which they tried to stabilise political conditions.

It did not take long for the otherparties and classes to see them as a threat

the lower classes, too, were able to articulate their hopes and expect-ations vis-à-vis their local and national governments

The gap between the wealthyand the poor was particularly visible in residential segregation, dress andshopping habits. Accordingly, the industrial societies of pre-1914 Europebecame more rigidly stratified in terms of socio-economic position and cul-tural habitus

To grasp the highly dynamic developments that the societies of Europeunderwent in the three or four decades before 1914, the impact of industri-alisation, demography and urbanisation must be considered as major back-ground factor

Yet at each level there was a willingness to riskor to accept war as a solution to a whole range of problems, political, social,international, to say nothing of war as apparently the only way of resisting adirect physical threat. It is these attitudes which made war possible; and it isstill in an investigation of the mentalities of the rulers of Europe and theirsubjects that the explanation of the causes of the war will ultimately lie

That meansbuilding into the military organization at various levels some sort of self-questioning, problem-solving facility in order to deal with the as yet unfore-seen difficulties which will arise

Public disenchantment at the political aspects of the war therefore interactedwith public unrest at social and economic deprivation, to topple govern-ments and to bring the war effort to a halt

but they could be more easily absorbed into the parliamentary democraticsystem than was the case in the military autocracies

With the strain ofthe war intensifying, and with the respective high commands calling for evergreater sacrifices from their populations without any evident sign of victory,it was predictable that cries would arise for a reform of the entire governingsystem, not to mention for social and economic compensations for theenhanced 'military participation ratio.'

n ever costlier arma-ments stalemate was interacting with an ever bloodier operational (andtherefore strategic) stalemate, so it was not surprising that generals grewbaffled, politicians grew desperate, and the public grew ever more resentfulas the arms output meant little; what was more critical was how long eacheconomy and society could meet these unprecedented demands when theprospects of outright victory for either side seemed to be fading away.

The term political as used in these essays hasactually referred to two separate if interrelated aspects, the first being theavailability of financial, industrial, technological, and manpower resourcesfor the pursuit of victory, and the second being the willingness of the nationat large, and their political representatives in particular, to keep on support-ing the war effort

reated an effective Staff systemto handle tactical and operational problems, to analyze empirical data, toexperiment with new methods, and - most important of all - to encourageopen discussion which would also include challenging received ideas abouthow best things were to be done.

The Continentalbalance was upheld (barely); imperial interests were preserved, in some areasconsiderably enhanced; and relations with all of the Allied Great Powers wereskillfully utilized to benefit Britain's complex strategic situatio

well bring another powerful nation into the enemy coalition.Convinced of its own military effectiveness, however, Berlin proved incapa-ble of coldly weighing the balance of short-term versus long-term risk whichwas at the core of a truly Clausewitzian grand strategy.

et whereas the French,for example, enhanced their strategic effectiveness by clever alliance diplo-macy, the German military mind preferred a quite different solution: escap-ing from their geopolitical bind by a bold offensive move which, whileprovocative to neutral Great Powers, would hopefully shatter their immedi-ate foe and thus achieve the desired swift victory.

ver-reaching itself to gain a victory in a specific campaign, it ran the risk ofensuring that it could never win the war as a whole

ts basic flaw,which it repeated even more spectacularly in 1941, was to opt for strategiccourses of action which, while having a certain military logic to them,undermined rather than secured the nation's larger political goals

redefine their strategic aim: instead of going for an unattainable break-through, they would aim instead at attrition, wearing down the enemy'sforces until the magic moments arrived when they buckled under

As the defending forces fell back, their linesshortened; and Allied reinforcements appeared

Even the more mobile and spectacular campaigns in the European theatereventually fizzled, or ended in disaster, because the technical and logisticalproblems proved insuperable

If one attempted to punch a holethrough the first line by prolonged bombardments, one surrendered theelement of surprise and allowed the enemy to reinforce the second and thirdlines of trenches. Any advance took the troops farther and farther away fromtheir logistical supplies and rear commanders; fatigue merely compoundedthe problem

ame quick-firing guns whose demand for shells dras-tically complicated logistics also made it impossible for infantry and cavalryto survive on top of the ground in the face of the vastly enhanced fire power,and before the internal-combustion engine solved that problem as well,through the development of tanks and armored personnel carriers.

convey those items forward

s in so many other instances, the acid test of military effective-ness was whether one could handle not the expected but the unexpectedelements thrown up in war.

o a very large degree, in other words, it was impossible for the powers toachieve military effectiveness in the First World War without first finding asolution to a small but vital number of tactical problems: how to close with,and then overwhelm, the enemy's battlefleet; how to counter the attacks ofthe U-boats; how to open up a new strategic flank through amphibiousoperations; and - by far the most important of all - how to break into, andthen out of, an enemy-held trench system.

For it seems worth claiming that it was at the tacticallevel in this war (much more than in the 1939-45 conflict) that the criticalproblems occurred

ad been no real winners; everyonehad lost. Versailles had been a 'Carthaginian peace,' ultimately as dissatisfy-ing to the victors as to the defeated.

The Wehrmacht was a superb tactical instrument.Yet it was frequently launched in strategic and operational directions thatnullified numerous battlefield successes.

Strengths and weaknesses refer to the range of weapons and humancharacteristics that affect combat power.

t is not uncommon for a tactical system to require greater support than amilitary organization can actually provide.

It is possible for a military organization to fail to train its personnel toperform the tasks prescribed by its tactical system

There are some tactical systems that require an especially high level of trustbetween officers and men if they are to function.

Italianofficers by and large ignored their men, refused to share front-line hardships,and generally led from the rear. The result was an almost complete lack oftrust

Though any tactical system requires a militaryorganization to pay attention to these issues, some systems require unusuallystrong and resilient bonds with military units

Although different from surprise, rapid exploitation requires similarcapabilities and attributes. Effectiveness in this category involves the utiliza-tion of a wide variety of opportunities created by the almost random fluidityof mechanized warfare

Although different from surprise, rapid exploitation requires similarcapabilities and attributes. Effectiveness in this category involves the utiliza-tion of a wide variety of opportunities created by the almost random fluidityof mechanized warfare

Historically, surprise has been a potent multiplier of combat power. It isdifficult to find a military that rejects surprise as an advantageous condition.

his measure of tactical effectiveness closely resembles that of its counterpartat the operational level. However, tactical effectiveness requires that theprinciple of integration and combined arms not be strictly weapons-cen-tered, but rather be applied to all the factors affecting combat power.

mmediate tactical problem of how to get throughthe killing zone of the enemy's firepower.

he dubious doctrine of the DuPicq-Grandmaison school constituted French operational doctrine. The tac-tical system was accordingly based on the infantryman's ability to moverapidly in close order across the artillery and machine gun killing zone toengage the enemy in close combat, preferably with the bayonet.

The adoption of particular tactical systems can hamper military organiza-tions in their pursuit of strategic objectives

The tactical level of military activity refers to the specific techniques used bycombat units to fight engagements in order to secure operational objectives.

The result was that Bomber Command did notplace its strengths against German weaknesses.

employment of military forces to achieve objectives for which they arelargely unsuited.

The most potent and ingenious operational capabilities are worthless unless anetwork of supporting activities buttresses them

At adeeper level, mobility and flexibility depend at least as much, if not more, onan appropriate command and control network and on staff elements thatpermit military units to remain cohesive, distinctive organizations while theymaneuver.

Operational effectiveness has a distinct human element. The professionaland personal relationships between officers of different branches within thesame service as well as between different services provide the institutionaland psychological underpinnings for integrated action.

aking full advantage of these military assetsincreases the likelihood that an armed force will fulfill its mission

Measures or indicators of operational effectiveness must reflect thisdoctrinal focus.

ithin the scope of operationalmatters lie the disposition and marshalling of military units, the selection oftheater objectives, the arrangement of logistical support, and the direction ofground, air, and sea forces.

Ideally, the best strategic course should aim to place strength against criticalweakness

Historically - and certainly in this century — coalitions have conducted asignificant percentage of wars

Although a military organization may possess limited power over the ulti-mate fit between strategic decisions and national goals, it usually has morecontrol over the extent to which its force structure is appropriate to itsanticipated uses

The process of selecting national political goals and strategic objectivesshould be interactive.

strategic objective or course of action may fit desired political goals but stillnot be prudent if the risks and costs of failure are sufficiently great

Political goals no doubt should informstrategy, but the strategic alternatives, enunciated by the military, maysimultaneously shape those goals.

The strategic level of military activity refers to the employment of nationalarmed forces to secure by force national goals defined by political leadership

Especially important for military organizations is the willingcooperation and service of the educated and skilled middle and upper classes.

ocietal resistance or sup-port can influence the effectiveness not only of conscription, but also ofcombat power.

e military may possess the legal right touniversal conscription, but coercion alone cannot provide the personnel, ifthe society, or an elite within it, desires to circumvent the legal structur

Access to manpower involves not only legal power, but also moral andpractical legitimacy.

n anability to articulate its needs more persuasively than its competitors canarticulate theirs

For a military organization to act strategically, operationally, or tactically, itmust consistently secure the resources required to maintain, expand, andreconstitute itself

Military activity takes place at four different levels: political, strategic,operational, and tactical.

ertical dimension involvesthe preparation for and conduct of war at the political, strategic, operational,and tactical levels

orizontal dimension consists in thenumerous, simultaneous, and interdependent tasks that military organiza-tions must execute at each hierarchical level with differing levels of intensityin order to perform with proficiency.

actical systems and their proper utilization on the battlefield.

No amount of operational [or tactical] virtuosity ... redeemed fundamental flawsin political judgment.

Transnational history does not start with one state and move on to others, but takes multiple levels of historical experience as given, levels which are both below and above the national level.

I joined a collective which reached out across national frontiers to create a new kind of museum, one which treated the Great War as a transnational catastrophe.21 This blending of different national viewpoints and emphases suited the new Europe of the 1990s, when it became apparent that to understand the integration of Europe at the end of the 20th century, you had to understand the disintegration of Europe at its beginning.

I term it the “transnational generation”. This generation has a global outlook. The term “global” describes both the tendency to write about the war in more than European terms and to see the conflict as trans-European, trans-Atlantic, and beyond

The demonization of the enemy and the spiritualization of the cause, are themes with clear links to Mosse’s work, and which have constituted a kind of anthropological approach to the history of violence in the two world wars.

rom the 1970s on, European integration was an attempt to move away from the notion of the nation state as that institution which had the right to go to war,

“death imprint”; the knowledge that their survival was a purely arbitrary accident.

Here was a military historian’s book, but one whose starting point was humane and to a degree psychological.

his was the environment in which darker histories of the Great War emerged. There were still scholars who insisted that the Great War was a noble cause, won by those who had right on their side. But there were others who came to portray the Great War as a futile exercise: a tragedy, a stupid, horrendous waste of lives, producing nothing of great value

battle presented men with terrifying challenges. The men who fought at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 could run to the next hill to save their lives. Foot soldiers converging on Waterloo four centuries later could arrive a day late. But in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, there was no escape. Given the industrialization of warfare, the air above the trenches on the Somme was filled with lethal projectiles from which there was no escape

glow of the “just war” of 1939-1945 had faded, and a new generation was more open to a view that war was a catastrophe to both winners and losers alike.

Whatever was wrong with the world seemed to be linked to 1914, to the time when a multitude of decent men went off to fight one war and wound up fighting a much more terrible one.

This second generation of historians wrote in the late 1950s and 1960s, and wrote not only the history of politics and decision-making at the top, but also the history of social structures and social movements.

he second generation I term the generation “fifty years on”. While much of the first generation of historians wrote official history, which tends to the history of officials, the second generation wrote peoples’ history, or the history of politics and society at war.

This is not an omission; it is a choice as to what matters in recounting the history of the war. The first generation defined history as the story of power and violence – and of those who wielded these weapons in wartime

Many historians saw it as their patriotic duty to justify the peaceful intentions of their nation in the war crisis of 1914. If we believe all of them, no one wanted war in 1914, and no one was responsible for its outbreak.

here were also official histories, many of which were written by former soldiers for the benefit of the various national staff colleges, trying one at a time to frame “lessons” for the future

his first generation was also composed of men whose memoirs went over the ground again for evident purposes of self-justification.

Across the world, the imperial state as a form of territorialgovernance was under attack and in retreat, while the nation-state was on the rise

he crisis of imperial legitimacy ignited by thewar and its aftermath.

It was that the logic of popularrule, which argued that political legitimacy derived not from divine sanction butfrom the people, had finally, after a long and arduous process, achieved near-universal recognition.

Here, as elsewhere, the nation-building pro-cess came at a high price, paid in particular by the minorities of the country

The abrupt break-up of Europe’s land empires and the inability of the successorstates to agree on borders with their neighbors certainly played a prominent role intriggering postwar violence

absence of functioning states, militias of various political persuasions assumed therole of the national army for themselves

in the collision in Eastern and Central Europe of twocurrents of global revolution, the revolutions of national self-determination andthe social revolutions for the redistribution of power, land, and wealth along classlines

fought in the name of these new nation-states sought to determine or defend theirreal or imagined borders through force and strove to create ethnically or religiouslyhomogenous communitie

iolence was particularly intense in thevast territories of the defeated dynastic land empires—the Habsburg, Romanov,and Ottoman empires—whose disappearance from the map provided the space forthe emergence of new and often nervously aggressive nation-states.

The war thus hastened a process of imperial decline that would eventu-ally lead to the collapse of a global order based on territorial empires and replace itby one predicated on the nation-state as the only internationally legitimate form ofpolitical organization

thewar also delivered a severe body blow to the empires on the winning side, gen-erating new forms of upheaval, disorder, and resistance

In many of the colonies, there was a political calculation on the part of thosewho chose to enlist or those who encouraged others to do so

we should see the First World Warnot simply as a war between European nation-states but also, and perhaps primar-ily, as a war among global empires

he end of the Irish Civil War in the same year, the restoration of ameasure of equilibrium in Germany after the end of the Franco-Belgian occupa-tion of the Ruhr, the decisive victory of the Bolshevik regime in Russia in a bloodycivil war, and the reconfiguration of power relations in East Asia at theWashington Conference, were all further signs that the cycle of violence, for thetime being, had run its course

we must examine the war within a frame that is both longer (temporally)and wider (spatially) than the usual one.

That world unraveled dramatically in the twentieth century, beginningwith the cataclysm of the First World War

one that can bring together the agglomer-ation of wars that defined the era to consider how their specific logics, modalities and temporalitiesintersect, how they diverge and what this might tell us about a global history of conflict in the period

xploring the contrasts and commonalities between experiences of conflict in colonialcontexts and the imperial shatterzones will help us better grapple with the dynamics that structuredextreme violence in the period and their relations to the shifting regimes of alterity that were cen-tral to imperial collapse, survival and expansion

critical re-engagement with concepts like POW, internee, veteran and paramil-itary through the prism of colonial experiences in the period has the potential not only to extend thegeographical reach of our scholarship but also to refine our frameworks of analysis so they can bet-ter account for the diversity of experiences of conflict across all of the spaces touched by the GreaterWar.

represented both an evolution of past practices of colonial confinement and a prefiguration of thecounter-insurgency tactics that would shape later wars of decolonisation.

his meant POWs of the inter-imperial conflicts in colonialspheres were not extended the same protections granted to their peers in Europe

some scholars of colonial campaigns of repression during the Greater Warinsist on the use of the term ‘war’ to describe these conflicts.

ere again we see how a continuum of colonial violence that often stretched far beyond even theexpanded chronologies of the Greater War remains vital to understanding the way conflict unfoldedin many colonial contexts

While these conflicts were integral to the Greater War,they were also constitutive of the longer process of colonial conquest and the resistance it provoked.

expansion of the chronology of violence in the period has inevitably shifted focus awayfrom the once-dominant Western Front and towards the complex and multiple conflicts that definedthe war and its aftermath in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, as well as the disintegrat-ing Ottoman Empire.

The rise of the Greater War paradigm, a framework that conceives of ‘imperial survival andexpansion’ as the driving force of violence, has pushed beyond the geographical and chronologi-cal boundaries of traditional narratives of the First World War, tracking conflict across large swathesof the world in the years directly before and after the declarations of war in August 1914 and theArmistice of November 1918.

they remain on the margins of the conceptualisation of conflict in theperiod.

he period of the Centenary of the First World War was marked by the heightened prominenceof the ‘colonial contribution’ to the conflict in commemorative discourse

Indeed, the clash at El Herri had begun as a classic colonial punitive raid defined by the typeof extreme violence against civilians that was a key characteristic of colonial warfare.