Anywhere But The Western Front
More than 100 years after the guns finally fell silent, our memory of the outbreak of the World War One is still firmly centered on what happened in Belgium and France. This is perhaps not surprising, as, in many ways, it was here that the outcome of the war was determined in the first six or seven weeks. In Britain, the defensive battle around the city of Mons in western Belgium, fought by the Empire’s small but experienced expeditionary force, is what is best remembered today, while the French remember the catastrophic number of casualties suffered in the early parts of the Campaign, but also the decisive victory at the Marne, which marked the end of Germany’s advance on Paris. In Belgium, the determined fight against a far superior enemy is still a story that many are proud of, but people also mourn the civilian losses at the hands of the German invaders in what came to be known as The Rape of Belgium.
However, World War One was first and foremost a ‘World’ war, and even in the early weeks, heavy fighting was taking place far from what would later become the Western Front. Here, millions of men, to whom names like Mons, the Marne, Liegé and Namur meant little, were fighting in enormous battles, the names of which have now been almost completely lost to time.
The Bloody Balkans
In the Balkans, the Austro-Hungarians sought not only to punish the Serbs for the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, but to completely crush their troublesome neighbors. What the general staff had expected to be a quick and easy victory over the small Kingdom quickly turned into a nightmare. Before even encountering the enemy’s main force, the invaders suffered greatly on long and gruelling marches across a region of Europe devoid of roads and studded with numerous hills and ridges. “You feel as if you haven’t slept for days,” wrote one Austro-Hungarian infantryman.
“The thirst burns, the sweat runs down the forehead like a little stream and is collected by a dirty hand on the chin and drunk as the only precious liquid available … Half the men have ailing feet. On the road, the artillery and the endless line of wagons rattle by, clouds whirl up from the bottomless dust and settle an inch thick on the infantry. The eyes become inflamed, the lungs gasp, the tongue sticks to the palate…”.
On the night of 15th August 1914, the exhausted men were ambushed by the Serbs on the Cer Mountain. What followed were days of bloody fighting before the Austro-Hungarians were thrown into a headlong retreat, back across the border, leaving thousands of their dead behind. “You wouldn’t believe it,” recalled one Serbian soldier. “So many… were killed that one could step from man to man, from corpse to corpse, for [nearly a mile].”
The Terrible Cost of War in The East
Meanwhile, in East Prussia, Germany’s war contrasted heavily with the one they were waging in Belgium and France. Here, they were the ones being invaded, and the enormous Russian army was the invader. While the rest of the German Army pursued the goal of a quick victory in the West, the Eighth Army stood alone in the East to hold back the ‘Russian Steamroller’. The first clashes along the border did not end well for the Germans, and many soldiers experienced a rude awakening to the realities of modern war. “No, this is not an honest fight, but just plain, dastardly murder,” wrote one soldier. “Poor fool, you let yourself be deceived like that! Full of strife, you turned away from life and joyfully went to war, which you believed would turn machines into people again. What a terrible mistake!”
Fearing a complete defeat, the commander of Eight Army ordered a general retreat. This did not sit well with the German military leadership, and the commander was quickly retired and replaced by the superb military partnership of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff. A brilliant, yet daring, plan involving deception and rapid relocation of forces by rail was quickly put into motion, resulting in a stunning victory and near-complete destruction of the Russian Second Army at the Battle of Tannenberg.
The largest battles beyond the more familiar battlegrounds in France and Belgium, however, were fought in the region of Galicia (today part of western Ukraine and southern Poland). Here, nearly 1.5 million Austro-Hungarian and Russian soldiers slogged it out along a vast frontline in a series of huge meeting engagements that resembled 19th-century battles, but were fought with the modern and terrifyingly deadly weapons of the 20th century. An Italian soldier, serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, described the sheer carnage:
“It seemed like the end of the world: cannon fire, gunshots, the rapid fire of machine-guns, the bullets whistling everywhere; the dead and wounded were heaped around: some with no legs, some with no arms, those with heads split open, those wounded in the belly who were losing their intestines. The situation was impossible to describe. Little by little we reached a trench filled with our guys… It was all blood and corpses, you didn’t even know where to step.”
In the end, numbers decided the outcome, and the Austro-Hungarians were forced to retreat to the Carpathian Mountains, having suffered more than 400,000 casualties in just three weeks of fighting.
The War Beyond Europe
Neither was Europe the only continent touched by the ravages of war. The British shot of the war, fired on 7 August 1914, did not ring out in Belgium, but in Togoland in West Africa. Who was the shooter? Not a white man, but a soldier of the Gold Coast Regiment named Alhaji Grunshi. The war had come to Africa, and not in an isolated manner either. More fighting would break out across southern Africa for the possession of German South East- and South West Africa. Soon, hundreds of thousands of Germans, British, Indians, South Africans, Rhodesians, Belgians, and many more, both Europeans and Africans, would take part in gruelling battles and skirmishes through inhospitable jungles and burning hot savannahs.
Meanwhile, colonial powers would also bring the world to Europe to boost their armies’ numbers. Britain prepared to ship men from the Indian Subcontinent to France, while France herself was quick to begin mobilising her own colonial subjects from across Africa. While many of these men had not much understanding of why the war had broken out (no doubt a question few anywhere could honestly answer at the time), they were not immune to the feelings of excitement and enthusiasm that many felt in August 1914. A Senegalese soldier, Bakary Diallo, remarked: “The Serjeant-major reads a despatch out loud. It’s a bit long and we only grasp two things from it: ‘Germany has declared war on France… And France calls on all her children.’ Once we’ve understood… we get giddier and giddier. It’s incredible how a sense of excitement takes hold of us, overwhelms us, lifts our souls aloft.”
Meanwhile, in Britain’s dominions, scattered across the globe, people also rushed to join up. When war broke out, Canada pledged 25,000 men, Australia 20,000 and New Zealand 8,000. Even tiny, Newfoundland, with a population of about 250,000, offered up what few men it could. It almost seemed as if they were fighting for prominence, As one civil servant remarked: “The dominions are as jealous of each other as cats.” While it would take slightly longer for Canada’s sons to reach the battlefields, Australia and New Zealand were quick off the mark, seizing the territories of German New Guinea and Samoa. Today, it is almost completely forgotten that these two nations, whose memories of this war are so closely tied to the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915, saw their first actions, not in Turkey, not in Palestine, and not in France or Belgium, but in the Pacific in late August and September 1914.
A final German possession, far from the fighting in Europe, which also came under attack by foreign powers, was Kiaochao Bay, which was leased from China and administered from the port of Tsingtao. Japan had long harboured ambitions for expansion in China and, with war in Europe, the Japanese eyed an opportunity. When Britain asked for Japanese help to deprive Germany of her most important port in the Pacific, they seized upon it and, on 23rd August, Japan declared war on Germany. Soon, Tsingtao, defended by just 700 German troops, was besieged by the Japanese army and navy. This turn of events not only brought the conflict to the Far East, but also marked the first involvement of a neutral, completely non-European nation in the war.
While all of these actions outside of Europe were relatively small compared to what was to come in the Second World War, they nevertheless proved that a war of this scale could not be contained to Europe and that, almost as soon as it began, the First World War was a truly global conflict.
Nicolai Eberholst is an historian and archivist based in Copenhagen and the co-author, alongside Alex Churchill, of Ring of Fire: A New Global History of the Outbreak of the First World War.
