The Great War Part IV: Graveyard of the Empires

As Europe rushed to war in 1914 few could have forecast the demise of four empires – the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman – as a consequence of the conflict. If pressed there might have been some, fond of a wager, who would gamble on the possibility of revolution in Russia; after all, there had been a revolution which had almost ended Czarism in 1905 and social unrest had been on the rise since 1912. Russia would go first in October 1917 but within a few short months all bets were off as to who might follow it into revolution.

What is frequently overlooked is the fact that the war was preceded not only by a rise in nationalist feeling but also by a wave of revolutionary upheaval and strikes,­ by no means confined to Russia alone. In Iran in 1905-6 a revolution forced the Shah to agree to a constitution and a parliament and opposed corruption and the interference in the country’s affairs by Britain and Russia. It was the first modern national liberation movement. Revolution in Iran was followed by revolution in Turkey in 1907, in China in 1911 and in Mexico in 1912.

In Russia there was a serious heightening of class tensions, ­just days before the war broke out there were barricades erected in St Petersburg and a strike of 200,000 in protest at police brutality against a demonstration by workers from the Putilov factory held in solidarity with striking oil workers. In Britain, the Great Unrest of 1910-1914 saw a huge upsurge of militant unofficial strikes that swept mining, transport and engineering. The British ruling class was deeply shaken by the biggest workers’ movement since the Chartists. Trotsky wrote,

‘The vague shadow of revolution hovered over Britain in those days’.

Germany saw a wave of strikes in favour of widening the franchise between 1910-1912, often involving clashes with the police. The years 1911-1914 were also years of crisis in Italian society: there was a general strike called in response to the conquest of Libya, and in the years just before the war there were big struggles, particularly in Turin and Milan.

France was polarised by the Dreyfus Affair, the victimisation of a Jewish officer by the high command under false charges of espionage. Anti-semitism was a mark of the French right.

Working class unrest was paralleled by a shift rightwards among sections of the upper classes – prefiguring the rise of fascism after the war’s end.

1914: The Collapse of the Left

The overwhelming majority of social democratic and labour parties rallied to their respective states at the outbreak of war – the socialist parties in Russia (both the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), Bulgaria and Italy were the exceptions.  Whatever the justifications, the German SPD, for example, could quote Marx out of context on the need to resist Russian autocracy, the crucial reason was that each party had become reconciled to to the interests and well being of their respective states.

But they also shared the general expectation that that this would be a short war, like the Franco-Prussian war of 1870; when the reality sunk home that this was going to be a long war involving mass mobilisation and the turning over of the economies of the combatant states to war production, it left the social democrats in a dangerous place. They, along with the trade union leaders, had accepted the need for sacrifice in the interest of the state, but what a sacrifice it turned out to be!

The working class and peasantry were not just killed or maimed in the trenches but at home they suffered conscription, inflation, no strike laws, restrictions on the movement of labour and inflated hours. Restrictions in food supplies verged on the catastrophic in Russia, Austro-Hungary and, eventually, Germany.

That also impacted on each state.  Every contradiction was accentuated – class conflict and nationalist aspirations above all. But also the ability of the state to function was put to the supreme test, and very quickly a number could not guarantee that transport functioned, food supplies were maintained and morale maintained.

Russia: First To Fall

The pattern of Russia’s war was that it could defeat Austro-Hungarian armies but not German ones. In the opening shots of the war, in 1914, Russia lost two armies, over 250,000 men, in two defeats at the hands of the Germans, Tannenberg and the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes. By the middle of 1915 all of Russian Poland and Lithuania, and most of Latvia, were overrun by the German army.

The Russian army, like those of Austro-Hungary, France and Italy, was overwhelmingly peasant based.  Three-quarters of Russian soldiers were peasants, a British military attaché would later write:

“The Russian peasant population is essentially pacific and the least Imperialistic in the world. It never understood why it fought.”

Before the war there was much talk of the “Russian steamroller” rolling over Germany – referring to the theory that the Czarist state could mobilise it millions of subjects and thus overwhelm the enemy. In fact pre-war just a quarter of young men subject to military service were called up; in part because the state could not afford more, in part because the peasants refused to answer the call. Once war broke out the Russian state was unable to enforce conscription and its armies had no great advantage over Germany or Austria-Hungary.

In August 1914 the Russian high command shared the common belief that this would be a short war, and because they did not believe Russian industry could supply its needs, relied on placing orders for material with their allies. This would throw state finances into crisis and the armaments often simply never arrived or if they did were left to rot in the ports of Murmansk, Archangel and Vladivostok because the railway system could not cope. In the years leading up to the outbreak of war the French government had repeatedly implored Russia to improve rail links to the front, pleas which largely went unheeded.  Eventually the military were forced to rely on domestic manufacturers.

The Russian economy, in terms of military production, preformed relatively well in comparison to its rivals, but the problems lay, firstly, with transport which meant the front could not be adequately supplied. Secondly, the aristocratic senior officers refused to use what was at hand. The artillery was heavily officered by the upper class and it refused to co-ordinate with the more plebeian officered infantry, or to provide the support needed when it came to an offensive. When the enemy attacked the artillery were the first to go, leaving the infantry with no support. Thirdly, the insistence on maintaining cavalry units meant vast resources were wasted on feeding horses.

Inflation also mounted, as elsewhere, but as cash lost value, the peasantry would not sell food for paper money which was losing its value, and the state could not guarantee food supplies to either the cities or the front given the chaotic state of the railways. Bread riots broke out in Moscow as early as April 1915.

In the summer of 1916 a brilliantly conceived and executed offensive led by General Brusilov came near to knocking Austro-Hungary out of the war but the Germans came to their allies rescue. At the close of 1916 Russia’s losses stood at 1,700,000 military dead and 5,000,000 wounded.

By the autumn of 1916 there were at least 12 mutinies among units ordered onto the offensive, involving at minimum a regiment, in eight of 14 Russian armies. After the February revolution 700,000 had deserted by August 1917, some 200,000 surrendered and many who remained would not fight.

The driving force in the Russian revolutions of 1917 was the refusal of peasant soldiers to fight, the spread of that rebellion into the countryside which fused with the urban strikes and protests. But another feature of the revolution was that the Russian officer corps was also split. The cavalry and artillery were officered by nobles who refused too often to adapt. For instance up until 1915 the artillery’s priority was manning border fortresses, despite ample evidence these could not withstand modern fire power. The result was that that when they fell in quick succession huge stocks of guns and shells fell into enemy hands while the infantry lacked the sorts of guns needed on the front, howitzers for instance, adding to the problems already pointed too.

In the infantry there were middle class officers who understood modern warfare. They resented aristocrats in senior positions. The new middle class junior officers (alongside some peasant and working class recruits) were anti-Czar to varying degrees – from liberal to revolutionary. They became caught up in the radicalisation of  the war and could not but contrast their lot in the front line with their superiors to the rear, indolent and greedy. Even senior officers would rally to the new Soviet Republic, among them Russia’s outstanding general, Brusilov.

In February 1917 the junior officers were pro-revolution and sided with their men. The army was already dissolving because it could not be sustained, its loss doomed Czar Nicholas and the Romanovs. Many junior officers and NCOs would carry on moving leftwards until eventually in the autumn of 1917 they backed the one party promising an immediate end to the war – the Bolsheviks.

In February 1917 the revolution began with women in Petrograd rioting over bread, it spread to become a mass strike in the capital, with the workers taking control of their neighbourhoods and creating soviets, and then revolt spread to the Petrograd Garrison. This contained a disproportionate number of soldiers convalescing from wounds and even workers who had been drafted as punishment for striking. When it mutinied that rapidly spread to the Baltic Fleet and then right across the army.

Austria-Hungary

In simple military terms, the performance of Austria-Hungary’s armed forces was woeful., The ramshackle Austro-Hungarian army could not even defeat tiny Serbia, which it had first declared war on. That required German and Bulgarian intervention.

The national contradictions in an empire ruled jointly from Vienna and Budapest (with little co-ordination), were even more accentuated than in Russia. The spark which initially ignited the war was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand carried out by a Bosnian Serb but assisted by Bosnian Muslims and Croats. While Serbian nationalism, Pan-Slavism and South Slav/Yugoslav nationalism were all, and still are, contradictory, sometimes overlapping, ideologies, a desire to break the southern Slavic territories from Austro-Hungarian rule and combining them with the existing independent Kingdoms of Montenegro and Serbia did not necessarily mean a Serb dominated, ethnic nationalism driven state was the only possible outcome. Although the Kingdom of Serbia had a terrible record on administering areas with minority nationality populations, many acquired during the Balkan Wars of 1912-3, it was widely hoped that a multi-ethnic South Slav entity could come into being, governed on the basis of the equality of the peoples of the Balkans. Although this outcome would require the sweeping aside of numerous factions within the existing Serbian and Montenegrin states it was a much desired and very much achievable goal.

The Czech bourgeoisie lived in a relatively developed country which could aspire to Western European living standards and performance based on its industries. As the war developed many of them became adherents of an Allied victory.

For much of the war the Austro-Hungarian high command could rely on nationalist rivalries to ensure their armies fought. Croats, Slovenians and Bosnians might fight well on the Italian front because they were fed stories, truthful in reality, of Italian ambitions to secure Dalmatia and Istria. But that could not be relied upon for long.

By 1917 strikes and demonstrations were spreading across Austria and Hungary with a massive demonstration in Budapest calling for peace in May. In January of the following year munitions workers in Austria went on strike and the stoppage spread to Hungary, with some 700,000 workers downing tools, halting arms production. It was bloodily suppressed.

In May 1917 the 17^th Infantry Battallion based in Austria but made up mainly of Slovenes mutinied declaring:

“The war must be ended now, whoever is a Slovene, join us. We are going home; they should give us more to eat and end the war; up with the Bolsheviks, long live bread, down with the war.”

The release of Austrian prisoners of war by the Bolsheviks helped popularise the Russian Revolution. But the Allies reacted too by proclaiming support for the independence of Czechoslovakia and the Southern Slavs (the people of future Yugoslavia). They understood they needed to create a nationalist revolt whose aims were the creation of states linked to them.

By 1918 the lack of food was fuelling widespread unrest both in the army and at home. One Polish soldier serving with the 10^th army wrote home early that year  saying:

“I think we will all die of hunger before a bullet gets us…Ah dear mother, our dog is better fed than I am here. In the cabbage there are worms… we have to live and fight like this.”

On 1 February 1918 the Austro-Hungarian fleet based at Cattaro (today Kotor in Montenegro) mutinied with sailors on the admiral’s flagship first taking control of the vessel and then other warships following suit and running up the red flag of revolt. The mutineers demands included support for Soviet Russia’s peace proposals, full demobilisation and replacement of the armed forces by a volunteer based militia. The rebellion was only crushed by shore defence forces and naval units brought in from elsewhere.

In Istria there were reports of people dropping dead of hunger or trying to live off grass and nettles. By this time, 90 per cent of letters handled in Vienna and Feldkirch by the censors were complaining of lack of food.

 The weekly potato ration now stood at only ½ kg per person and the Austrian Food Office  was threatening further cuts in rations. In mid-June 1918 tens of thousands of starving people took to the streets in Vienna and plundered the potato fields around the city. Nearly 47,000 male and female workers went on strike. Food supplies then dried up, with none at all coming from Hungary.

In June 1918, 2000 Hungarian troops mutinied at Pécs, aided by local coal miners, and it took the intervention of three loyal regiments to end it. That same month armament workers in Hungary staged a nine day general strike which was only called off after leaders of the Social Democratic Party intervened, urging a return to work.

In the final days of October 1918 there was an insurrection in Budapest which overthrew imperial rule and installed the Hungarian National Council, made up of the Social Democrats and rural based parties, in government pledged to introducing universal suffrage and land reform.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire faced two fault lines: the first its break up along national lines, the second growing working class insurgency. These two responses to the war were not separate, workers and peasants could combine both in seeking peace and social justice.

The weakness and confusion of the left in the collapsing empire also meant the revolutionary instinct of the working class and much of the peasantry was not articulated or given a strategic direction.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his book Nations and Nationalism, cites a study which looks at a large number of letters from soldiers writing home to Austria-Hungary. The impact of the war and then of the Russian Revolution increased political awareness:

“Among the activists of some of the oppressed nationalities such as the Poles and Ukrainians, the event raised hopes of reform­ perhaps even of independence. However, the dominant mood was a desire for peace and social transformation… Even where we find the strongest national tone ­as among the Czech, Serbian and Italian letters ­we also find an overwhelming wish for social transformation.”

Nationalism and class consciousness existed together because both seemed to offer escape from the trenches and freedom from alien rule

“Men and women did not choose collective identification as they chose shoes, knowing that one could only put on one pair at a time. They had, and still have, several attachments and loyalties simultaneously, including nationality, and are simultaneously concerned with various aspects of life, any of which may at any one time be foremost in their minds, as occasion suggests. For long periods of time these different attachments would not make incompatible demands on a person…it was only when one of these loyalties conflicted directly with another or others that a problem of choosing between them arose”

Many of those soldiers who sympathised with the Russian Revolution would have been enthusiastic in supporting the war three years earlier. National independence and revolution seemed to both offer an escape route. The first was a more common sense option as it seemed more achievable especially because this was not a process without outside intervention.

Freed from their alliance with Russia and ignoring their promises to Italy, in 1917 Britain, France and the USA championed “the rights of nations to self-determination” – not of course in Ireland or India, Algeria or Indochina or Puerto Rica and the Philippines. In eastern Europe that meant promising the creation of a Polish, Czechoslovak and Yugoslav states. The allies worked hard to rally support in those nations, even from the future Polish dictator, Pilsudski, who was fighting for the Germans and Austrians, and to raise armies which could move in if the war ended in their victory.

The support of the USA and President Woodrow Wilson was important here because, hard as it might be to believe today, they were seen as champions of democracy whose word could be believed.

With the backing of the victorious Allied powers political figures like Pilsudski in Poland and Tomáš Masaryk in Czechoslovakia were able to win popular support, adopting radical language. The creation of Yugoslavia owed much to popular support among various South Slav nationalities but its foundation was very much due to the existence of a Serbian state and army.

Where the left was capable of playing a serious role it was able to galvanise these aspirations for social change, with the creation of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, and in Bulgaria where the Communist Party developed mass support.

Bulgaria

In September 1918 30,000 Bulgarian troops mutined and it spread to the garrison of the capital, Sofia while in three other towns soviets were formed. Order was only restored in Sofia by officer cadets and the intervention of a German division en route from Crimea to the front.

On 27 September a republic was declared headed by the leaders of the peasant based Agrarian Party and 15,000 rebel soldiers marched on Sofia to capture the capital but were defeated. But unrest continued among the civilian population and the army Bulgaria signed a ceasefire with the Allies on 29 September and the following week King Ferdinand abdicated and went into exile, with his son taking the throne. The new government, however, was headed by the radical Agrarian Union, which had opposed the war and pushed through land reform, earning it the hatred of the ruling class. The government had little or no control over the military.

In the 1920 elections the Agrarian Union allied with the Communists won 59 percent of the vote. In 1923 the army overthrew the government, and the Communists refused to support it, even when it tried to raise a rebellion. Releasing their mistake the Communists tried to seize power on their own and were brutally crushed. Order was restored via a brutal slaughter.

France

The impact of the February Revolution in Russia and the overthrow of the Czar had a major impact in galvanising anti-war feeling in France, both in the trenches and on the home front. The presence of Russian soldiers on the Western Front also helped spread a revolutionary message among their comrades in the French and British forces.

The duration and horror of the war, the ineptitude of the generals, the plummeting living standards, all fed into a crisis of nationalism. The February Revolution transformed the resistance to the war. It became less piecemeal and more widespread and unified.

On 16 April 1917 the French commander, General Nivelle, launched an offensive. Sixty French divisions attacked near Reims and on the Chemin des Dames, a deeply defended ridge between two river valleys in the Champagne region. The result was a catastrophe with losses totalling 134,000 with at least 30,000 killed in just 10 days.

Even before this slaughter began there was discontent among the French troops, many fresh from the horrific Battle of Verdun, as noted in the diary of Corporal Louis Barthas, of the 296th infantry regiment. Barthas was a 35-year-old barrel-maker who was a socialist and pacifist when the war began. He fought, with distinction, before and after the mutinies.

“They read out the order of the day from that mass-murderer of 16 April, General Nivelle, to inform his troops (that is to say, his victims!) saying amidst other nonsense that ‘The hour of sacrifice has arrived and we must not think about leave!’ Reading this patriotic nonsense aroused no enthusiasm. On the contrary, it only demoralised the soldiers, who heard nothing but another terrible threat: new suffering, great dangers, the prospect of an awful death in a vain and useless sacrifice, because no one trusted the outcome of this new butchery.”

The “Song of Craonne” became popular among the troops (Craonne is a village on the Chemin des Dames ridge), which ran:

“Goodbye to life, goodbye to love, goodbye to women… It’s all over. This dreadful war is for ever. It’s at Craonne, on the ridge, That we must leave our skins, Because we are all condemned men. We are the sacrificed ones!”

It included the line

“Now it’s your turn, all you big shots, to climb the ridge, because if it’s war you want, pay for it with your own skin.”

The military offered a reward of one million francs plus immediate release from service for anyone who could reveal the song’s writer. No one came forward to claim the reward.

As casualties mounted soldiers bleated like sheep at units moving up to the front. On 29 April a battalion which had just come out of the line after suffering heavy losses was ordered to return. The soldiers had drunk their wine ration plus wine they’d stored and refused to obey, shouting “Down with the War.” Later at 2am they did return to the front. A dozen men were arrested, five were shot and the rest sent to penal colonies.

On 2 May the Second Division of the Colonial Infantry which had just left the line was ordered back. The soldiers lined up but without their weapons and refused to return to the attack. Eventually they agreed to relieve their comrades but would not fight. There was no punishment as there were too many who had refused to fight.

The mutiny spread across the French army. Mutineers from the 36th and 129th regiments met and composed a resolution: ‘We want peace…we’ve had enough of the war and we want the deputies to know it… When we go into the trenches, we will plant a white flag on the parapet. The Germans will do the same, and we will not fight until the peace is signed’.

Many wanted to march on Paris, chanted ‘Down with the war’ and sang the Internationale. In some units, the idea of creating soviets was discussed. In May, mutinous soldiers made connections with civilian workers: ‘I am ready to go into the trenches, but we are doing like the clothing workers. We are going out on strike,’ wrote one soldier.

The same month, the Commission d’Armée met in Paris, to be told by Deputy Abel Ferry that

“demoralisation is gripping the French army. It is with a heavy heart that I have to tell you that a regiment has revolted…that in several others military policemen have been attacked and hanged, and in the leave-trains soldiers are openly singing the Internationale!”

Army units elected councils, clearly drawing on the example of Russia where Soviets were challenging for effective control of the armed forces. Some of these units set off for Paris, only being stopped by hastily summoned units still loyal to the High Command. The 119^th Regiment mounted machine guns on their trucks and attempted to seize the Schneider-Creusot works, intending it seems to blow it up.

Neville was dismissed and replaced by General Petain, the commander who had defended Verdun. Pétain toured army units, battalion by battalion, promising them that he understood their frustration and would address grievances about leave and rations, but above all that the French would not undertake any further offensives and that “we shall wait for the Americans and the tanks.” By June, discipline had been largely restored within the French army.

68 out of 112 French divisions on active service saw mutinies. 3500 soldiers were found guilty of mutiny but executions were limited with an eye on not damaging morale further. In 1916 desertions totalled just 3000 but in 1917 they totalled 30,000.

Gains had also been won for the common soldier. Food and accommodation were improved and, above all, soldiers were given the regular leave for seven to ten days every four months, with a right of appeal should it be refused. Better clean-up facilities were provided.

In June, two Russian brigades who had been sent to fight on the Western Front were withdrawn from the line and moved to a camp at La Courtine, 200 miles south of Paris. They quickly established a soviet, involving French soldiers,

By the end of July the 10,000 men at La Courtine were heading for open revolt… ‘Down with the war!’ said a notice over the door of the delegates’ hut. Passing round the units was a proclamation from Russia, ‘Declaration of the Soldiers’ Rights’, which advocated freedom of speech and revolution.

The camp was surrounded by loyal Russian and French units which opened fire with artillery. Nine mutineers were killed before the rest surrendered. The bulk of them were used as labour behind the front lines but those deemed ringleaders were sent to Algeria to labour there until 1919 or 1920.

Between 20 May and 10 June 1917 some 40,000 soldiers took part in 250 to 300 protests. Subsequently 3427 men were court-martialled with 554 being shot; 1381 received serious sentences (often amounting to execution) and 1492 lighter ones.

The scholar, Jean-Jacques Becker, argues that public opinion in France remained pro-war to the ends but adds some important conditions. Support was far greater among the rural population while the urban working class resisted strongly falling living standards. After the heavy losses of the Spring of 1917 he concludes public opinion was for peace, but this was not defined, morale was mediocre or poor in a majority of departments.

After the conclusion of the war the main trade union federation, the CGT, dropped its no strike policy and saw its membership almost triple to 1.5 million by the middle of 1920.

Germany

At the start of 1916 the German offensive at Verdun brought growing casualty lists. On the home front wages had fallen by between 20 and 40 percent as food prices mushroomed. Food was already in short supply.

May saw three days of food riots in Leipzig, only ended when the military imposed a state of siege. In Offenbach women and children demonstrated, shouting “We are hungry and demand bread.” In Worms two food stores were looted.

On 1 May the anti-war Reichstag deputy, Karl Liebknecht called an anti war protest, calling for “Bread, Freedom, Peace” at a square in central Berlin. Several thousand workers joined the protest but the police mobilised in great numbers. When they tried to clear the square Liebknecht cried “Down with the War, Down with the Government” and was promptly arrested.

When he was brought before a military court martial, he had now been called up for service, engineering shop stewards in Berlin called a one day strike. Their call was answered by 50,000 workers in 40 factories. Shouting “Long live Liebknecht, Long live Peace” they marched through the city free from police interference.

Nevertheless, Liebknecht was jailed and his comrade Rosa Luxemburg soon followed behind bars. They had, however, launched the Spartacist League, which had at most a few thousand members, which seems in the main to have been made up of former members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) youth organisation. In the Charlottenburg and Moabit areas of inner Berlin, part of the city’s red belt, it had just seven members. From his exile across the border in Switzerland, Lenin criticised the lack of “firm illegal organisation.”

In August thousands of women gathered outside the town hall in Hamburg demanding food and clashing with police. The authorities were forced to hand out food coupons.

1916 saw a 70 percent increase in strikes, and they also involved more workers, with numbers striking up 100 percent. The docks and the Ruhr coalfield were centres of militancy.

The failure of the potato harvest made matters much worse. Germany faced the “Turnip Winter,” with lack of food putting the old, the young and the sick in danger. The authorities received reports of growing opposition to the war and the number of strikes increased.

Within the SPD there was growing tension. That Spring the party split with the creation of the USPD, Independent Social Democrats, whose membership soon matched the SPD’s, uniting those who wanted peace with no loss of conquered territories to revolutionaries. The USPD won mass support but its leadership insisted they must operate constitutionally and their polices were little different from the SPD’s except over their somewhat fragile stance on the war.

Yet the creation of an anti-war organisation with popular support which included well known party and trade union leaders provided a focus for the growing anti-war mood. However, the USPD had no strategy for ending the war. On the far left Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were much clearer, arguing the main enemy was at home, but they stopped short of adopting a position like Lenin’s call to turn the war into a civil war.

On 28 January 1918 some 400,000 workers answered its strike call demanding workers involvement in securing peace without annexations. The Berlin strike was called off after a week but by then the stoppage had spread with 23,000 dockers out in Kiel and 28,000 in Hamburg and strikes across the Ruhr coalfield.

In Germany the collapse of Tsarism removed the right wing Social Democrats’ ‘excuse’ that the war was directed against Russian tyranny. It became increasingly obvious to the German people that the aims of industrialists were expansionist: they wanted to push into Belgium and France and exercise ‘hegemony’ over Eastern and Central Europe.⁹¹ In April 1917 a strike of 200,000 metal workers was led by militants opposed to the war. Increasingly spontaneous strikes and unrest over food shortages was beginning to fuse with political opposition to the war. The October Revolution in Russia hurried that process along.

1917 also saw fresh food riots, with unrest in Hannover and Harburg with food shops looted. The next month it was Hamburg’s turn: over two days 116 shops were pillaged. In April food riots broke out in Mainz, Stettin (today Szczecin in Poland) and Dusseldorf, where 50 shops were looted before the authorities imposed a “severe state of emergency,” arresting 200 people. The riots spread to Upper Silesia where, in Hindenburg, the local government offices were stormed, crowds battled police and looted shops.
In 1918 strikes increased with government reports noting that women munition workers were in the van. The stoppages mixed economic and political demands – for an extension of the franchise, a people’s republic and so on. The failure of Germany’s spring offensive, with loud claims that victory was nigh, brought a slump in morale at home.
On the Eastern Front the high command was worried about Bolshevism contaminating its troops. Already by mid-1917 it noted that on troop trains moving men from the east to the Western Front, 10 percent of troops disappeared passing through Germany. On 5 September 1917 a gunner noted with distaste:

“That socialism has already gained the upper hand in everything is characterised in our battery by the fact that a so-called soldiers’ council has its hands in everything.”

The transfer of former prisoners of war released from captivity in Russia to units on the Western Front had to be halted when widespread sympathy for the Bolsheviks was discovered among them.

Some half a million troops remained on the Eastern Front throughout 1918. The Bolsheviks worked hard to subvery them and in April military intelligence reported the existence of underground groups in the city of Kowno, “whose task it was to canvass for German soldiers who were to distribute several thousand leaflets among the troops as quickly as possible.”

That autumn the Eastern army began to collapse. Five thousand men mutinied in Dwinsk when ordered west and on 2 October in Charkow some two thousand followed their example.

When the 11 November armistice came into effect the Allies wanted the German army to remain in place to counter the Bolsheviks but it simply dissolved. Troops began flocked home.

Meanwhile to the west, Liebknecht and other political prisoners were released in October. 20,000 greeted his return to Berlin and he was carried to the platform to address the crowd by soldiers wearing the military decoration the Iron Cross.

On 27 October the high seas fleet was ordered to sail for one last battle with the British, it was a suicide mission. Sailors in Wilhemshaven put out the boilers aboard the warships so they could not leave port. Their example was followed in other ports. The attack was called of. Unrest continued in the fleet and on 3 November in Kiel a crowd of protesting ratings ran into a naval patrol whose commander ordered his men to fire, killing eight and wounding many more. On 5 November warships in the harbour ran up the red flag and officers were disarmed or thrown overboard. Dockers joined the mutineers and an armed crowd marched on the naval jail to release their jailed comrades.

On 4 November a minelayer reached Cruxhaven carrying news of the Kiel mutiny and the sailors there joined the revolt. The next day the mutiny spread to Hamburg, Lubeck and Wilhelmshaven, where 35,000 sailors demonstrated against there officers and hoisted the red flag over their barracks.

On 8 November the new Chancellor, Prince Max, reported:

“Halle and Leipzig were red at 5pm. Dusseldorf, Haltern, Osnabruck, Luneburg, Magdeburg, Stuggart, Oldenburg, Brunswick and Cologne in the evening. Frankfurt at 7pm.”

On 8 November the revolution – for that it what is now was – reached Munich and the King Ludwig III of Bavaria abdicated. The next day it came to Berlin with the capital’s garrison, until now regarded as loyal, joining it.

On 9 November Prince Max resigned and handed power to the right wing social democrat Ebert.  A general strike was spreading across the capital and crack units who might have been expected to fight for their emperor now joined the mutiny. The German Empire was finished. The Kaiser took train for exile in Holland. Shadowing the new government was a nationwide network of Workers, Soldiers and Sailors Councils. Germany was entering years of revolutionary crisis which only ended in October 1923.

Italy

Discipline in the Italian army was extremely harsh with 350,000 court-martialled between May 1915 and November 1918, with 4028 receiving the death sentence and 750 being shot. The commander until November 1917, Cardorna, even ordered the execution of one man in 10, decimation, in units who were accused of cowardice.

In 1917 there were 48,282 mutineers in the Italian army, and 56,268 deserters. The numbers kept rising; between May and October there were 24,000 new mutineers or deserters. Mutinies were met with increasing repression­ 359 soldiers were executed in 1917, compared to 66 in 1915. By September 1917 it was reported ‘there was no counting the number of times soldiers refused to march’.

In August 1917 a general strike began in Turin after police killed two people during a protest over bread shortages. It quickly became a virtual insurrection which had to be brutally suppressed by the military. The Turin rising was brutally repressed. Troops armed with machine guns killed over 50 people and wounded 800. Over 1,000 demonstrators, mainly Fiat workers, were sent to the front, and swathes of the country were placed under military rule.

Antonio Gramsci wrote:

“Four years of war have rapidly changed the economic and intellectual climate. Vast workforces have come into being, and a deeply rooted violence in the relations between wage‑earners and entrepreneurs has now appeared in such an overt form that it is obvious to even the dullest onlooker. No less spectacular is the open manner in which the bourgeois state…shows itself to be the instrument of this violence.”

In October 1917 the Italian army were humiliated at Caporetto: although the Central Powers did not significantly outnumber the Italian troops, it turned into a rout. The Central Powers took 293,000 prisoners. The Italian commander’s staff car was surrounded by hordes of soldiers intent on going home, who chanted for peace and “Viva Lenin.”

But Caporetto was not simply a military disaster. There was an element of anti-war consciousness involved: 300,000 men surrendered, refusing to fight. The Italian commander was sacked. A new government was formed which took control of affairs. Promises, never kept, were made that peasant soldiers would receive land, conditions for the infantry were improved. The new line of defence, along the River Piave, north of Venice held; in large part, because German units were withdrawn and the Austro-Hungarian army lacked the numbers and material to break through.

In late October 1918 the Italians claimed a military victory, though in truth the Austro-Hungarian army simply collapsed. For the Italian state and ruling class, they were thrust into the rapids of revolution from which they only emerged with the advent of fascism in October 1922.

Britain

In Britain the centre of opposition to the war during 1914 and 1915 was on Clydeside (for a more detailed account see my A People’s History of Scotland). The government could contain that because it fought alone and because the full impact of the war had not yet come home. For a long time, Sylvia Pankhurst argued, “the war was remote as events in a history book: its naked cruelties were not realised.” That would change in 1916.

On the first day of the Somme offensive 21,000 soldiers were killed and twice that number wounded. It was the worst day in the history of the British army. When the offensive was called off there were 1 million casualties and the British had failed to reach the objectives set for that first day.

The following year an offensive centred on Passchendaele lasted three months and left around 325,000 Allied and 260,000 German casualties with the British advancing just five miles. Overall 13 percent of British troops on the Western Front were killed and 36 percent were wounded.

The introduction of conscription in March 1916 in Britain (but not Ireland) led to a demonstration on 20,000 in London on 8 April. Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers Suffrage Federation led a large contingent eight miles from Bow in the East End to join the rally in Trafalgar Square. There soldiers and sailors physically attacked speakers and threw red dye at them, but the size of the protest showed the mood was shifting.

The 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland also impacted, although John Maclean and Sylvia Pankhurst were among very few on the British left who supported it. The biggest shift was among the Irish community which began its shift from the pro-war Nationalist Party to Sinn Fein, the threat of conscription in 1918 accelerated that.

As elsewhere the February 1917 revolution in Russia galvanised the anti-war forces. In June 1917 the ILP and BSP initiated Leeds Convention bringing together various shades of opposition to the war, chaired by Robert Smillie of the Miners Federation speakers included Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Ernest Bevin, Mrs Despard, Bertrand Russell, W.C. Anderson, William Gallacher and Sylvia Pankhurst.

Of the 1150 delegates some 300 came from ILP branches, 90 from the BSP and 580 from trade union branches and trades councils – including Glasgow, Leeds and Sheffied. Ramsey MacDonald told the gathering that, “today we congratulated the Russians without any reservations whatever.”

He was elected to a provisional committee charged with creating workers and soldiers councils across Britain. The resolution adopted demanded peace without annexations and indemnities, and full independence for Ireland, India and Egypt. Within a few months MacDonald and others charged with creating soviets in Britain would be biter opponents of the new Soviet Russia. That autumn the Labour Party conference voted down a BSP motion (the party was affiliated to Labour) declaring the war an imperialist one that had to be ended immediately, by 1,697,000 votes to 302,000.

Mutinies did take place. In September 1917 there were five days of disorder among British troops at Etaples base camp. Etaples was notorious for its brutal regime and bullying officers. An article in the Workers Dreadnought of 30 September carried a report from a participant in the mutiny:

‘About four weeks ago about 10,000 men had a big racket at Etaples and cleared the place from one end to the other, and when the General asked what was wrong, they said they wanted the war stopped’.

On Wednesday 12 September, defying orders comfining them to camp, over a thousand men protested in the town.That afternoon 400 men from the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) arrived, a rather upper class unit, armed with wooden staves. They were backed up by a section from the Machine Gun Corps. They surrounded the camp and just 300 mutineers broke through their cordon, the rest staying put. The mutiny was over.
One man was executed, three others received 10 years’ penal servitude. Ten mutineers were jailed for up to a year’s imprisonment with hard labour, 33 were sentenced to between seven and ninety days field punishment and others were fined or reduced in rank.
Most mutinies in the British army took place after the Armistice, mainly demanding demobilisation.

The main form of protest during the war was strike action. At the beginning of August 1914 there were 100 strikes taking place but that fell to just 20 within four weeks. But from there strikes became more common, eventually reaching 6 million days lost because of industrial action.

The biggest unofficial strike took place in late 1916. In October in Sheffield a skilled fitter, Leonard Hargreaves, was called up, in clear violation of government assurances that munitions workers were exempt. His employer, Vickers, failed to provide the documentation needed for Hargreaves to exempt himself so he was swept up into the army.

On 8 November the district committee of the engineering union and the shops stewards committee which had emerged across the city’s engineering plants called a mass meeting. Significantly they opened this up to skilled workers from all trades. The meeting decided to give the authorities notice that unless Hargreaves was returned within a week they would strike.

On the afternoon of 15 November 200 shop stewards were assembled ready to act. Couriers were ready to announce their decision in workplaces across the city and to spread news of the strike nationwide. A telegram arrived from the headquarters of the engineering union claiming Hargreaves would be returned and demanding no strike. But the workers managed to contact Hargreaves who knew nothing of this.

The next morning a further mass meeting decided “No Hargreaves, No Work!” and the strike began. Local union officials demanded a return to work but to no avail. The next day a key local employer, Sir Robert Hadfield, contacted the shop stewards to say they could meet Hargreaves off the London train. The following morning he was brought onto the platform at a mass meeting, only then did the strike end.

In April 1917 the government repudiated the system agreed with the unions protecting skilled workers from being called up, intending to conscript large numbers of men previously reserved for industrial work. Later that month a Rochdale engineering firm extended dilution to private work in breach of a national agreement. A strike spread rapidly until 60,000 Lancashire workers were out. Engineering workers struck in Sheffield and Rotherham, Coventry, London and other areas. The strikes of May 1917 involved over 200,000 workers and the loss of one-and-a-half million working days.

In Sheffield there were clashes with the police which came to a halt when strikers were issued with staves. The leadership of the engineering union suspended the Sheffield district committee which had called the strike and police arrested eight shop stewards they regarded as ringleaders.

The government, concerned at the threat to the war effort, agreed to meet a  delegation of shop stewards. They agreed to call for a return to work in exchange for the release of the arrested leaders. They also accepted that further negotiations would take place between the government and the official trade union leaders. The stewards failed to win the restoration of the old system. The Ministry of Munitions did agree to abandon its proposal to extend dilution into private work.

The issue of dilution was linked to conscription, and the increasing need to find more men for the Western Front. The shop stewards in Sheffield, Glasgow and other cities never made that clear, despite their own anti-war position, nor did they attempt to challenge conscription.

Labour unrest continued. Women workers on London buses and trams went on strike in 1918 to demand the same increase in pay (war bonus) as men. The strike spread to London Underground and to women workers elsewhere in the South East of England. This was the first equal pay strike in Britain!

The stage was set for an explosion of industrial unrest in 1919 when the British ruling class believed they were tottering on the edge of revolution.

The armistice ending the war came into force at 11am on 11 November. But the war had destabilised Europe. The old order had either been toppled or was badly rocked. The creation of new states had increased not lessened the chances of further wars and the inter-war years would see greater class polarisation. Peace was precarious indeed.