The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (60 page)

With everyone but Obregon dead, the war finally ended, and Mexico stabilized as a single-party state. Obregon brought all of the major factions into the government and bought them off with a share of power. Anyone who stayed outside and refused to cooperate was shut off from the government, and no independent opposition party could break the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s firm grip on power for several generations, until 2000.

FIRST WORLD WAR

Death toll:
15 million (8.5 million soldiers
¹
+ 6.6 million civilians,
²
rounded off; not including postwar flu deaths or deaths from various postwar civil wars)

Rank:
11

Type:
hegemonial war

Broad dividing line:
Germany vs. everyone

Time frame:
1914–18

Locations:
Europe, Near East, North Atlantic

Major state participants:
Austria-Hungary and Germany vs. France, Italy, Russia, and the United Kingdom (each of these mobilizing more than 5 million troops and losing more than a half-million dead)

Minor state participants:
almost everybody else; it’s probably easier to list the countries that stayed out.

Non-Participants:
in Europe: Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. In the Orient: Afghanistan, China, Ethiopia, and Siam. Most of Latin America.

Who usually gets the most blame:
No one in particular, just the international system of militarized nation-states in general. Kaiser Wilhelm and the military aristocracy of Germany are often blamed for escalating it from a regional squabble to a world war.

Another damn:
war of trenches and idiotic frontal assaults

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
Was it really as stupid as it sounds?

A
LTHOUGH THE FIRST WORLD WAR RANKS ONLY ELEVENTH ON MY LIST BY
overall body count—including civilians—it would easily rank second if I counted only soldiers. The war was a meat grinder that killed more soldiers than any other four wars you can name—except of course for its sequel and namesake, World War II.

The exhaustion of this war sparked the overthrow of four of the world’s most powerful dynasties—our old friends the Hapsburgs, the Romanovs, and the Ottomans, plus the Prussian Hohenzollerns. At least three local wars continued to rage even after an armistice brought peace between the major participants. World War I destroyed a cooperative international order based on interrelated monarchs and multinational investment, replacing it with a world of competing ideologies. All of the conflicts, struggles, and tragedies that became the hallmarks of the twentieth century were rooted in the destruction of the First World War.

Why?

Taking a lesson from the gigantic national armies that had conquered Europe on behalf of Napoleon (see “Napoleonic Wars”) and France on behalf of Bismarck (see “Franco-Prussian War”), most regimes in Europe adopted universal conscription in the nineteenth century. The draft was popular with politicians on both sides of the aisle. The left wing approved of conscription because modern armies erased class distinctions and promoted by merit, putting arms into the hands of the people instead of the aristocracy. Reserve duty gave the nation an opportunity to provide a small measure of education, health care, and income to the working classes. The right wing liked national service because it promoted obedience, collected the masses to be washed and disciplined, and gave the government a tool to bully foreigners and dissidents. All across the continent, conscription created enormous armies that faced each other across disputed borders.
³

Supplying, collecting, and deploying these giant national armies required railroads, and doing it right required carefully planned timetables. In case of war, reserve units would have to gather at the village train depot at the exact time to catch the exact train that was assigned to collect them. These trains would converge on the enemy’s border at fixed intervals to be unloaded quickly and then sent back for more troops—all without stalling or crashing into trains arriving from the wrong direction at the wrong time. In the event of a real war, speed mattered. Whoever got their armies mobilized and placed on the disputed border first could strike and penetrate many miles into essentially undefended territory for every day the enemy delayed.
⁴

For years, contested borderlands had divided nations all over Europe. Germany and France squabbled over Alsace-Lorraine. Austria and Serbia both felt entitled to Bosnia; Italy and Austria quarreled over Tyrol, as did Bulgaria and Greece over Thrace, as did Germany and Denmark over Schleswig-Holstein. The ethnic boundaries of Europe were so convoluted that every nation had little alien enclaves that would prefer to belong to a neighboring country. It all sounds terribly complicated, but it created a very simple foreign policy: your neighbor was your enemy; your neighbor’s neighbor was your neighbor’s enemy and, therefore, your friend.

On the larger scale, nations also competed for mastery in the international pecking order. By beating France in 1871, Germany had become top dog of Europe, and the Germans had recently embarked on a massive shipbuilding program to challenge British dominance of the seas. Austria and Russia competed to replace the fading power of Turkey as lord of the Balkans. To pursue these rivalries each nation sought allies to back them up in a time of crisis. France, for example, needed someone on the other side of Germany to make the Germans think twice before invading again. The French could hook up with either Russia or Austria—it didn’t really matter—but whichever they picked, the other would attach itself to Germany by default. After a generation of shuffling, nudging, and posturing, Europe had divided into two power blocs—the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy versus the Triple Entente of France, Britain, and Russia.
*

A small war between any two of these countries could easily escalate to a six-power war within weeks. If one side failed to mobilize before the other attacked, it was screwed. This doesn’t mean that foreign policy was a predestined, hair-trigger mousetrap. At any time, human intervention could have interrupted the process and averted war. For example, Italy—or rather, the men who made decisions on behalf of Italy—decided that their country didn’t really need to get involved in the initial quarrel, so they sat out the opening declarations of war despite Italy’s obligation by treaty to assist Germany and Austria.

The Spark

Gavrilo Princip created the twentieth century on June 28, 1914. Almost every geopolitical trend that unfolded across the globe for the next eight decades traces back to the day this Serbian terrorist assassinated the Hapsburg heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in the provincial capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. After he was hustled off by police, his Austrian interrogators learned that the assassination had been planned in Belgrade. They issued an ultimatum to Serbia: let us follow up our leads or else.

Serbia refused, and Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Russia couldn’t let Austria destroy a fellow Eastern Orthodox, Slavic nation and gain another piece of the Balkans, so the Russians declared war on Austria. Germany couldn’t let a fellow German nation that shared its longest border get crushed by Russia so the Germans took the plunge as well.

Then the Germans demanded an assurance from France that the French wouldn’t be jumping on Germany while the Germans were busy invading Russia. They even wanted the French to allow German troops to occupy key French border fortifications so that France would be unable to cause any trouble. France, of course, refused, so Germany declared war on it as well.
⁵

The Germans had long realized that the alliance between France and Russia would put them in a vise, so the General Staff had already worked out all of the details and filed the plan away for just such an occasion. Faced with a two-front war, the Germans needed to knock one of these enemies out of the game quickly and decisively.

But which one? Russia was too big and deep for a lightning invasion, which made France a more tempting target. Its capital was closer (the distance between the German border and Saint Petersburg was twice the distance between Germany and Paris),
⁶
and the French armies would be mobilized much sooner, so Germany should act fast. Fortunately it would take the large and sluggish Russian Empire awhile to mobilize, which should give Germany enough time to go after France first. Unfortunately the German border with France was short and the Germans would never find a gap to punch through. They would have to go around the French line. That meant going through neutral Belgium, which would almost certainly enrage the British, but if everything went smoothly, Paris would be taken before the British could mobilize and cross the English Channel.

The Germans quickly moved into Belgium. To ensure speed, they ruthlessly suppressed every hint of resistance they spotted in the Belgian populace. A single potshot from a sniper was often punished with the execution of all of the men in town. They shot 211 Belgian civilians at Andenne, 384 more at Tamines, and 612 at Dinant. At the city of Louvain, they executed 209 civilians and destroyed eleven hundred buildings, including the library with 230,000 books. In all, the passing Germans killed some 5,500 Belgian civilians to quiet the population.
⁷

Having penetrated the entire depth of Belgium, the German army wheeled left and flooded across the border into France along a wide front, only to discover that modern weapons favored the defensive even more than prewar planners had suspected. Machine guns mercilessly cut through attackers; hence, this phase of the opening campaigns became remembered in German history as the Kindermord—the “Massacre of the Innocents.” The German army had to throw more and more soldiers at each position just to compensate for the soldiers being slaughtered charging across open ground. This meant they had to tighten up and shorten their offensive lines.

The French were discovering the flip side. Because machines guns were so good at piling up German bodies, defensive lines could be stretched thinner and longer. By the time the forward elements of the German advance reached the Marne River, just short of Paris, the French had outflanked them, and a counterattack stopped them.

As the principal armies dug in outside Paris, their flanks swept outward, looking to turn the enemy’s flank while keeping the enemy from turning theirs. This race to the sea ended when there was no further flank to turn.

Stuck in the Mud

Most history books make this war sound stupider than it really was, which is not easy. Charging into the face of entrenched machine guns sounds pretty stupid, but eventually many generals learned to not do that.

Perfected in the late 1880s, a machine gun sprays out bullets so quickly that it is physically impossible for soldiers to attack across open ground without being cut down—no matter how many soldiers rush at it, and no matter how quickly they run. Within the first few months, the armies realized that the days of pure, gutsy frontal assaults were over. The only thing left to do was to dig in and figure out Plan B.
⁸