British Isles. To avoid capture the submarines tor-
pedoed, without warning, boats bound for
Britain. On 7 May 1915 the Germans sank the
British passenger liner Lusitania; almost 2,000
crew and passengers, including women and chil-
dren, lost their lives. World opinion, especially in
the US, was outraged: 128 Americans had been
among those who had lost their lives. Germany’s
excuse that starving women and children in
Germany were victims of Britain’s food blockade
was always flimsy. The submarine campaign failed
completely in its objective. It failed to cut off vital
supplies from reaching France and Britain and it
failed to frighten the neutral countries from con-
tinuing to expand their trade with the Allies.
Germany launched a propaganda campaign of
hatred directed especially against Britain. This had
little effect on those actually engaged on the bat-
tlefronts. Much to the embarrassment of the gen-
erals on both sides, the German and Allied troops
on the western front spontaneously stopped fight-
ing on Christmas Day 1914, exchanged gifts and
even played football between the trenches. There
was little hatred, even a good deal of fellow feeling.
The soldiers knew that there was no way out of the
war except through death or injury or victory.
The Great War differed from the Second
World War in one very important respect. There
were no planned atrocities committed by the mil-
itary on prisoners of war or on civilians. Wartime
propaganda was, for the most part, lies. There
were no savage Huns killing Belgian priests, nuns
and babies, nor Belgian civilians behind the lines
gouging out the eyes of wounded Germans. The
Red Cross was respected in all countries, includ-
ing tsarist Russia. Brutalities no doubt occurred
but they were isolated. The blot on this record
was the forced deportation of some 60,000
Belgians in 1916 to work in German factories.
Though it was wartime, the socialists in the
Reichstag loudly protested; the deportations
ceased, and by the summer of 1917 the great
majority of the Belgians had been sent home
again. In Belgium itself no coercion was exercised
to force Belgian industry to work for the German
war effort, though factories were dismantled.
Only the miners, with the permission of the
Belgian government, continued to produce coal.
Both among the Belgians and in occupied
Russian Poland, the Germans and Austrians
attempted to win over the population to their
cause. The Poles were promised an independent
state at least in form, though in practice such an
independent Poland would have become a
German satellite. There was no maltreatment.
The Poles of Prussia and of the Habsburg
Monarchy fought with much loyalty for Germany
and the Habsburgs, seeing tsarist Russia as the
oppressor.
Unquestionably the worst atrocity against
defenceless civilians occurred in Turkey against
the Christian Armenian people in 1915 and
- When the war went badly for the Turks
in 1915 and the Russians were pushing into
Anatolia, the Russians attempted to inflame and
exploit Armenian nationalism against the Turks.
An Armenian Legion fought for the Russians and
an Armenian puppet government was set up. The
Turks, uncertain of the loyalty of the Armenian
population in Asia Minor committed the worst
atrocity of the war by ordering the wholesale
deportation of the Armenians from the lands
adjoining the battlefront to Syria. Armenian his-
torians accuse the Turks of genocide against their
people. Turkish historians admit that large mas-
sacres took place but deny that the Turkish gov-
ernment intended them to happen. Sporadic
massacres had already taken place before 1914,
shocking Western Europe. What is certain is that
the tragedy of 1915 and 1916 was on an even
greater scale. The forced deportation of men,
women and children caused the deaths of tens of
thousands through starvation and disease. Some
(by no means all) of the Turks reverted to out-
right massacres on the spot. There are no reliable
figures for those who perished. They vary, accord-
ing to whether the sources are Turkish or
Armenian, from 200,000 to more than 2 million.
Of the 1.6 million Armenians between a half and
three-quarters of a million perished.
The five great nations of Europe went to war
in 1914 not for any specific territorial gains. It
was not a ‘limited’ war in the post-Napoleonic
nineteenth-century manner. The war was a gigan-
tic contest between them to determine their
1
THE GREAT WAR I 93
