"The War to End All Wars: World War I" by Russell Freedman, Chapters 3–5

Crowds thronged the streets, singing their nation’s songs and cheering every military unit that passed.

We wanted to go to Berlin immediately, with bayonets, swords and lances, running after the Germans.

Swept up in an outpouring of patriotic fervor, young men flocked to recruiting stations all over Europe.

Now, in every warring nation, women took over jobs previously filled by men in munitions factories, offices, and agriculture, and, as the war continued, in almost any sort of job that could free a man for combat.

Kaiser Wilhelm, surrounded by his military entourage, always appeared in the medal-bedecked uniform of the “All Highest War Lord” at the constant parades and celebrations of past military victories.

I command you all to go to church, kneel before God and pray to him to help our gallant army.

That is the simple duty of every one of us. And this feeling is universal among the soldiers, especially since the night when England’s declaration of war was announced in the barracks. We none of us got to sleep until three o’clock in the morning, we were so full of excitement, fury, and enthusiasm.

The next day, as the British ambassador and his staff prepared to leave, the embassy’s three German employees, having been paid a month’s salary in advance, stripped off their embassy uniforms, spit and trampled on them, and refused to help carry the ambassador’s trunks down to the waiting taxis.

Gruesome atrocity stories began to appear in the newspapers. The German public read that the invading Russians were poisoning German lakes and cutting off the limbs of captured German soldiers, and that the French and Belgians were gouging out prisoners’ eyes.

Such enthusiasm!—the whole battalion with helmets and tunics decked with flowers—handkerchiefs waving untiringly—cheers on every side.

At that moment, quite spontaneously, like a smoldering fire suddenly erupting into roaring flames, an immense clamor arose as the Marseillaise [the French national anthem] burst from a thousand throats.

At that moment, quite spontaneously, like a smoldering fire suddenly erupting into roaring flames, an immense clamor arose as the Marseillaise [the French national anthem] burst from a thousand throats.

The women were throwing kisses and heaped flowers on our convoy.

A week after the fighting began, Russell wrote, “‘Patriots’ in all countries acclaim this brutal orgy as a noble determination to vindicate the right; reason and mercy are swept away in one great flood of hatred.... Whatever the outcome, [the war] must cause untold hardship and the loss of many thousands of our bravest and noblest citizens.”

Russell greatly underestimated the carnage that the war was about to cause. In 1914, Europe’s armies had only limited experience with the mass slaughter made possible by modern weapons.

To demolish the forts, the Germans brought up giant howitzers, firing shells that smashed through steel and concrete. One after another, the Belgian forts were blasted into submission. When the last fort surrendered on August 17, the Germans began their march across Belgium, driving thousands of frightened refugees before them.

Surprised by Belgian resistance and enraged by heavy German casualties, German soldiers imagined that snipers were shooting at them from every window and rooftop, even when there were no snipers in the area.

In reprisal, German troops rounded up and shot hundreds of ordinary civilians, including women and children, and burned villages to the ground.

Wildly exaggerated accounts of German atrocities inflamed public opinion and bolstered support for a war that was increasingly seen as a crusade against barbaric German militarism.

German newspapers, in turn, carried equally exaggerated accounts of German soldiers being savagely mutilated and killed by Belgian townsfolk.

As the ranks drew near to the German lines...rifles and machine guns pounded forth a rapid-fire of death from behind walls and hummocks and the windows of houses.

“It is clear that all the courage in the world cannot prevail against gunfire,” said a young French captain named Charles de Gaulle, who later became president of France.

The Great Retreat, as it came to be known, continued for two sweltering summer weeks at the end of August and the beginning of September.

Day after day under a scorching sun, hundreds of thousands of weary French and British soldiers trudged farther and farther south, covering some twenty miles a day, pausing again and again to fight off the enemy snapping at their heels.

Each infantryman lugged a ten-pound rifle and sixty or more pounds of ammunition, digging tools, and other equipment as he plodded along in stiff, mud-caked boots that inflamed heels, soles, and toes and rubbed whole patches of skin to the raw flesh.

Scores of stragglers dropped behind the retreating columns, hobbling alone or in twos or threes and struggling desperately to stay in touch with their units.

Cavalry troops dismounted and walked beside their horses, trying to conserve the weary animals’ strength.

As they prepared to march on the capital, the German right flank separated from the rest of the invading force, opening a gap between the German First and Second armies—a gap that Allied troops began to penetrate.

At one point during the fighting, French general Joseph-Simon Gallieni commandeered 2,000 Paris taxicabs, which rushed thousands of French reinforcements to the frontlines.

When the Germans reached high ground behind the Aisne, they began to dig furiously, preparing fortified trenches that they would defend against Allied attacks for the next four years.

“All around me, the most gruesome devastation. Dead and wounded soldiers, dead and dying animals, horse cadavers, burnt-out houses, dug-up fields, cars, clothes, weaponry—all this is scattered around me, a real mess. I didn’t think war would be like this.”

Trenches hastily scratched out in the boggy soil of Flanders had become part of a continuous line of fortified trenches that stretched 475 miles from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps.

When Scotland’s Second Highland Light Infantry Battalion was finally taken out of action, only thirty men remained of the more than one thousand who had come to France at the start of the war.

By November, the Russians had advanced into the wilds of the Carpathian Mountains, where they laid siege to the key Austrian fortress of Przemysl, now in Poland.

German troops invaded Poland from the west, engaging the Russians in a succession of fierce battles around the cities of Warsaw and Lodz.

The Russians finally lost Lodz in December, but they could not be ousted from their entrenchments around Warsaw.

The Austrians, meanwhile, also were being mauled by their troublesome little neighbor Serbia.

But the Serbs were tough, seasoned fighters, and each time they drove the Austrians back across their border.

In Africa, French and British troops invaded the German protectorate of Togoland, while German forces attacked the British colony of South Africa.

About 10 o’clock this morning I was peeping over the parapet when I saw a German, waving his arms, and presently two of them got out of their trenches and some came towards ours.