DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Did Germany nearly score victory in WWI?
The Killing Season: The Autumn of 1914, Ypres and the Afternoon That Cost Germany a War
Robert Cowley, 2025
Robert Cowley's latest book is an in-depth, engrossing and painful account of World War I in Western Europe from August through December 1914. Cowley believes that Germany had an opportunity to win the war in the West during the fall of 1914 even after the German army's retreat during the battle of the Marne in September, a retreat Cowley attributes to a "failure of nerve" of German generals. He asserts that Germany had a golden opportunity during late October, 1914, to break through British and French defenses a few miles from Ypres, Belgium, and exploit a two- mile gap opened up by German attacks on British forces, to take the Channel ports of Dunkirk, Calais and Boulogne, and in doing so, eliminate England's ability to supply its army in Belgium or send reinforcements to an army close to collapse. The Germans, Cowley believes, who possessed a large advantage in the size of their forces, could have poured thousands of soldiers through the gap in Allied defenses and encircled French and British forces in Belgium, opening (once again) a clear unblocked path to Paris. Cowley even goes so far as to maintain that Germany forever lost the ability to win World War I on the afternoon of October 31,1914 when they failed to follow up an unexpected collapse of British forces near Ypres for reasons Cowley discusses at length.
These are likely to be controversial views among historians of WWI for a number of reasons, especially the idea that German generals lost their nerve and, in doing so, lost the war on a single afternoon in late October 1914. Some historians believe that Germany came close to winning WWI during the late spring and early summer of 1918 when German leaders made an "all-in" wager on defeating the Allies before U.S. forces were able to make a decisive difference. One reason many Germans could never accept surrender in November 1918 was that the German army had come so close to victory in the West 5-6 months before the end of the war. The insistence that Germany had suffered a "stab in the back" from internal enemies arose out of expectations of victory in a bitter costly war, only to suffer a humiliating sudden defeat. Furthermore, Cowley acknowledges that Germany could have taken the Channel ports easily in late August and early September 1914, but chose instead to use all its military resources to conquer Paris.
Whatever one thinks about the importance Cowley gives to the first battle of Ypres during the fall of 1914, The Killing Season has many other virtues. It contains a lucid and cogent discussion of the scale of mass carnage during the first few months of WWI, and vivid descriptions of the conditions in which the Battle of First Ypres was fought.
Cowley offers astute analyzes of military leaders in the four armies engaged in Belgium: British, French, German and Belgian. Cowley has a low opinion of most of the military commanders on both sides, with particular disdain for Sir John French, the head of British forces on the Western Front during the fall of 1914 and Helmuth von Moltke, the architect of the German war plan. Moltke, more than any other German leader, was determined to use the opportunity for war created by the assassination of Archduke, Franz Ferdinand to implement the Schlieffen plan of invasion through Belgium, with the goal of quickly defeating France before Russia could mobilize its armies on the Eastern front. Moltke quickly crumbled under the pressure of decision making and had to be replaced during the early fall of 1914.
Cowley asserts that on one day, August 22, 1914, 27,000 French soldiers died in battle. According to Cowley, the French army suffered 90,000 combat deaths during September, the month in which the battle of the Marne occurred and more than 114,000 combat deaths from October through December 1914. "By the end of the year, French combat deaths totaled 301,100, "Cowley states. The German army experienced far fewer combat deaths during 1914, about one- third the number of deaths of French soldiers. One estimate of an academic expert (whom Cowley quotes) is that France suffered a population deficit of about 1,500,000 births from premature death and absence of soldiers during the war.
Cowley explains that there were so many combat deaths among the four million men in armies on the Western front during fall 1914 because the war was still a war of movement: "Open warfare is far more murderous than fighting from prepared defensive positions," Cowley states. During 1914, armies still had cavalry regiments, and armies often engaged in close combat in which soldiers used bayonets, as well as rifles. Machine guns and rifles took an enormous toll and so, of course, did artillery. Nevertheless, there were other factors based on military habit and training that led to mass casualties. Soldiers still attacked entrenched positions "in close order, "i.e., bunched together in large numbers, and military strategy emphasized the necessity of offensive actions which led to huge casualties when attacking defenders armed with machine guns.
In addition, during the fall of 1914 soldiers in all armies often fought with enthusiasm, willing to sacrifice their lives to fulfill ideals of valor and glory in battle. In its initial stages, WWI in all countries had widespread fervent popular support, including the support of left wing parties. The war did not begin or continue due to ideological differences, or the clash of different types of political systems. WW I was, to modern thinking , an unnecessary war whose costs in lives was out of all proportion to the stakes, which was mainly national pride and identity, along with an unwillingness to be defeated by enemies blamed for the war and for atrocities committed by enemy forces.
During the early 20th century, societies in Western Europe prized martial values, i.e., courage in combat and the willingness to die for one's country. Many soldiers expected to be ennobled by war, only to discover that there was no glory in being blown apart by artillery, drowning in mud, or being killed in the hundreds and thousands in attacks on entrenched positions. During the fall of 1914, the idea that war was a type of purification was still widespread in all armies.
At the beginning of his book, Cowley quotes Thomas Mann: "Remember the beginning of the war, those never- to- be- forgot days when something truly great had happened ... We hadn't believed in the war,; our political thinking was incapable of recognizing the need for a European catastrophe. As moral beings, though, we had seen the affliction coming- more than that we longed for it in some way. Deep in our hearts we felt that the world, our world, could no longer go on as it had ... War! It felt like a purification, a liberation, and a tremendous hope. ("Thoughts in Wartime," 1914)
Scholars continue to debate the causes of WWI, so ruinous and devastating to the very ideal of civilization: political alliances, countries' fear of being isolated, the German will to dominate Europe, Russia's desire to restore its military prestige damaged by defeat in the Russo- Japanese war of 1905, nationalism in the Balkans, and more. However, as Thomas Mann suggested in 1914, the war had a spiritual source, reflecting the ideals and imaginative vision of European civilization. A selfish, crass world would be redeemed in patriotic sacrifice!
The actual reality of war was a hell scape of unimaginable suffering. Cowley is at his best in vividly describing combat among 4 million soldiers in Belgium from mid -October to mid -November 1914. The war occurred in a cold heavy rain that filled trenches with water. Cowley writes: "Mud was the appropriate symbol of this new world of war - mud and water. .. the final two months of 1914 were .. the wettest on record. "Rain, rain, rain," noted a diarist of the Royal Welsh ...on December 4. "The winter floods had come, the parapet fell in right and left, the ditch-trench ran with a rapid current and had to be abandoned by day." Mud swallowed attacks ... Men got stuck in the mud and had to be dug out or they drowned in it. ... Men came out of the line barely recognizable as soldiers ... "Uniforms are in rags, dirty soaked, torn and lacking buttons." German commanders favored night attacks. "A single battalion supposed to number a thousand men, but more likely to have been reduced to six or seven hundred, might even fire off a hundred thousand rounds a day- which meant that all up and down the line millions of bullets were expended every twenty four hours."
Soldiers sometimes fought for days soaked to the bone, often with scraps of food (at best) and with little sleep. Armies sometimes took prisoners, sometimes not. Soldiers lived with fear of mutilation from artillery strikes which often continued for hours. Cowley writes: "It is not easy to comprehend how the civilized world of Europe had become so lethally divided so quickly. ... Both sides participated in what can be described as mass murder. An entire continent was suddenly bent on homicide ( or, some would argue, suicide and self mutilation). " Some soldiers who survived the war lost all faith in humanity, in civilization, in God, or whatever else they believed in prior to the war.
Part of their reason for despair was that after the carnage of fall 1914 and after the war had become a defensive war of trenches and daily bombardment, the countries engaged in this senseless slaughter did not seek a negotiated settlement. Rather, they doubled down on the goal of winning the war, which led to the battles of Verdun and the Somme, Ypres Two and Three, in which hundreds of thousands died without changing much on the Western front. Once countries had committed to war and lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in combat and from disease, public opinion in all countries except Russia supported continuation of the war, at whatever the cost. The cost was ultimately 9-11 million combat deaths followed by the Spanish flu (spread by soldiers) that may have killed 50-100 million people around the world.
WWI was a turning point in the history of war in the same way that the French Revolution forever changed European political institutions, i.e., it changed possibilities, aspirations and norms without effecting the bitter enmity of countries that had periodically engaged in war against one another for centuries. The war's scale, its lethality and its unmasking of nationalism's self destructive potential led, as Cowley maintains, to an even larger world war and to the holocaust and other genocides. One distinguished German historian has referred to WWI as a "Pandora's box" of maladies which, once released in an internecine slaughter, have proven impossible to contain.
-- Dee Wilson