World War One: A Short History Read Online Free PDF

in south-eastern Turkey, where they were acquired by an enterprising Austrian.
    5. Riezler’s biography is one of several Central European descants upon the history of the century. He married the daughter of the painter Max Liebermann, head (until Hitler) of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Riezler was a considerable philosopher (and wrote learnedly on Parmenides). He entered the German Foreign Office, in the press department, and became private secretary to Bethmann Hollweg, with whom he spent a great deal of time. When in 1917 Bethmann Hollweg fell from office, Riezler became a diplomat, arranging the arrival of Lenin in Stockholm. Then, after some rearrangement,he became associated with the Social Democrats who ran Germany in the twenties – private secretary to the Social Democrat president, Ebert – but he moved left and became professor at the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. In 1933, he moved to the USA, to the University of Chicago, where he used his influence to defeat the candidacy for professorship of Karl Popper, then an exile (from Austria) in New Zealand. In 1945, Alfred Einstein wrote to President Truman to say that they had come up with a terrible weapon, the atomic bomb, that might bring the whole of the world to an end. President Truman set up a commission to judge the morality of dropping it. Its president? Kurt Riezler. (He advised in favour.)

TWO • 1914

previous pages: Calling up of Turkish troops in Constantinople, October 1914
    In four years, the world went from 1870 to 1940. In 1914, cavalry cantered off to stirring music, the Austrian Prince Clary-Aldringen wore the uniform he had put on for a gala at Buckingham Palace, and early illustrations of the war show clumps of infantry charging with bayonets, as shrapnel explodes overhead. It is 1870. Fortresses were readied for prolonged sieges, medical services were still quite primitive, and severely wounded men were likely to die. By 1918, matters had become very different, and French generals had already devised a new method of warfare, in which tanks, infantry and aircraft collaborated, in the manner of the German Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’) of 1940. Cavalry regiments became museum-pieces, and fortresses, relics. The war proved to be a great killer – 10 million died – but it was, as the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, himself a doctor, called it, ‘the vaccinated apocalypse’. Medicine made greater progress in these four years than at any time before or after: by 1918, only 1 per cent of wounded men died.
    However, to begin with, illusion reigned. In 1914, to crowds of cheering people, the troops moved off, generals on horseback dreaming that they would have a statue in some square named after them. No war has ever begun with such a fundamental misunderstanding of its nature. Perhaps the deepest misunderstanding was British. On 3 August 1914 the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, made a speech in the House ofCommons that was very greatly admired and seems to have convinced many of the doubting MPs that war with Germany was right. He remarked that the country would suffer ‘terribly, in this war, whether we are in it or whether we stand aside’. In retrospect, a grotesque remark.
    Nearly half of the British economy, and over a third of the German, was taken up with foreign trade, much of it with the European Continent. Interruption of it was expected to bring unemployment and bankruptcy; another cabinet minister (who resigned) said that the social problems resulting from the interruption of trade would bring a variant of the revolutions of 1848, when the established order in old Europe had been swept away by upheavals in the cities. Because of the threat to trade, bankers – Sir Frederick Schuster of the Bank of England for one – assured everyone that the war would have to be stopped after six months. The generals themselves knew that they had the wherewithal to go on for a very long time – millions of men and the means to