Europeans went to war in 1914 with remarkable enthusiasm.
Government propaganda had been successful in stirring
up national antagonisms before the war. Now, in August
1914, the urgent pleas of governments for defense
against aggressors fell on receptive ears in every belligerent
nation. Most people seemed genuinely convinced
that their nation’s cause was just. A new set of illusions
also fed the enthusiasm for war. In August 1914, almost
everyone believed that because of the risk of damage
to the regional economy, the war would be over in a
few weeks. People were reminded that all European wars
since 1815 had in fact ended in a matter of weeks. Both
the soldiers who exuberantly boarded the trains for the
war front in August 1914 and the jubilant citizens who
bombarded them with flowers as they departed believed
that the warriors would be home by Christmas.
German hopes for a quick end to the war rested on
a military gamble. The Schlieffen Plan had called for
the German army to make a vast encircling movement
through Belgium into northern France that would sweep
around Paris and encircle most of the French army. But
the high command had not heeded Schlieffen’s advice to
place sufficient numbers of troops on the western salient
to guarantee success, and the German advance was halted
only 20 miles from Paris at the First Battle of the Marne
(September 6 –10). The war quickly turned into a stalemate
as neither the Germans nor the French could dislodge
the other from the trenches they had begun to
dig for shelter. Two lines of trenches soon extended from
the English Channel to the frontiers of Switzerland (see
Map 4.2). The Western Front had become bogged down
in a trench warfare that kept both sides immobilized in
virtually the same positions for four years.
In contrast to the west, the war in the east was marked
by much more mobility, although the cost in lives was
equally enormous. At the beginning of the war, the Russian
army moved into eastern Germany but was decisively
defeated at the battles of Tannenberg on August 30
and the Masurian Lakes on September 15. The Russians
were no longer a threat to German territory.
The Austrians, Germany’s allies, fared less well initially.
After they were defeated by the Russians in Galicia
and thrown out of Serbia as well, the Germans came to
their aid. A German-Austrian army defeated and routed
the Russian army in Galicia and pushed the Russians
back 300 miles into their own territory. Russian casualties
stood at 2.5 million killed, captured, or wounded; the
Russians had almost been knocked out of the war. Buoyed
by their success, the Germans and Austrians, joined by
the Bulgarians in September 1915, attacked and eliminated
Serbia from the war.
World History
