The Central Fronts

There is no lack of monographs on the Third Reich in World War II; similar scholarship on the Central Powers in the Great War is preciously rare. The introduction of Ring of Steel states that it is the “first modern history to narrate the Great War from the perspectives of the two major Central Powers”—which isn’t exactly true, but there’s only a single predecessor with any claim to the title: Holger Herwig’s The First World War: Germany and Austria Hungary 1914-1918 (1997). Herwig’s excellent work takes a more military focus; Watson’s aim is a broader overview of the engagement of German and Austrian societies with the war, a look at the means by which internal political, material, and emotional support were mustered for the conflict.

The diplomatic prelude to World War I is possibly the only aspect of the war in which the Central Powers have been adequately represented previously; subsequent histories tend to mire in Western trenches and the rarely ventured East. If the simple conjoined account of Austrian hauteur and Prussian militarism faded long ago as the motivational account of our Great War foes, there’s not a tremendous amount that’s replaced it. Watson’s study fills this void.

Germany was no belligerent monoculture. The largest association in Germany, excepting a veterans’ organization, was the moderately pacifistic Social Democratic party, which mustered a respectable bloc of the Reichstag. Their skepticism of war was only overcome as foes, particularly the Russians, mobilized; and they were encouraged by state nods to their sensibilities, with an amnesty for political crimes announced on the eve of the vote for war credits. (There were some abstentions but no votes against.) Disengaging from international trade had real effects on internal harmony: Nearly six million Siemens light bulb orders were lost; urban unemployment skyrocketed.

Austria-Hungary was a different story. This multiethnic patchwork was an implausible mosaic in an age of increasingly rigid ethnic geometry. Practical efforts to resolve ethnic conflict had led to the dual monarchy, which mainly institutionalized Hungarian ethnocracy in its portion of the empire and empowered the Hungarians to starve the whole of suitable war preparations. The empire had nonetheless made liberal efforts, mainly in its Austrian portion, to manage its varied population. The Austrian Army, for one, boasted 142 monolingual regiments, 162 bilingual regiments, 24 trilingual regiments, and several with four official languages! Jews constituted about 5 percent of the populace but 17 percent of the officer corps. The marvel isn’t that mobilization came off well, but that it was accomplished at all. Absentee rates from conscription varied radically by region: few in Austria, somewhat more among the Czechs, more than 25 percent in Galicia and the South Slavic regions. Loyalty to the Habsburg monarchy remained intact. Roman Catholicism, the faith of the majority of the empire’s subjects, proved a strong bond.

These measures proved an especially potent incentive to mobilization in those border regions that faced some immediate existential threat. Populations along the Russian frontier had reason to fear conquest; Slovenians and Croats rallied easily against the Serbs. Groups that had no such fears, such as the Czechs, or ethnic sympathies that rested elsewhere, such as Romanians in Hungary, were a different story. And yet, amidst this stew, dissent, whether imagined or real, was typically crushed.

Both states lumbered to battle and, like virtually every combatant in the war, soon reeled from the murderous collision of modern weaponry and aged tactics. Germany was at least materially well equipped for the conflict; Austria-Hungary was terribly prepared on almost every level, suffering rapid setbacks in Serbia and Galicia. Russian advances sent Galicians and East Prussians fleeing westward. Austria-Hungary, which was agriculturally self-sustaining before the war, lost its best agricultural lands in Galicia, which were never restored to more than

35 percent of their productivity by the end of the conflict. Austrian rationing was ineptly implemented, Hungary limited exports to Austria, and widespread suspicion that regions were hoarding stoked internal resentments.

Germany, considerably more reliant on imports at the start of the war, found the vise of a British blockade—which not only limited exports to neutrals but strong-armed the neutrals’ sale of surpluses—tightening to Britain. Ersatz products sprang up, colorfully titled—“Hindenburg cigars,” “Piłsudski chocolates”—and repulsively constituted: quark dumplings, turnip mash, even flour made out of gypsum.

The situation of the Central Powers was gradually stabilized, mainly as a result of strenuous German efforts to prop up their wobbly partners with infusions of soldiers, weaponry, and direction. But privation, mass casualties, and the certainty of more of the same fueled a gradual radicalization of war aims. Austria’s desired prize was obviously the subjugation of Serbia; Germany had no clear initial territorial aims. As the war unfolded, and the competence of generals Erich von Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg vaulted them to effective rule of Germany, war aims became progressively dramatic, including expansion into occupied Russian territory. Watson’s descriptions of these occupied territories—where efforts to win the sympathies of Poles and Ukrainians were largely squandered through harsh administration, internecine squabbling, and sham proposals for puppet ethnic states—is a notable strength of this account.

Our knowledge of the final missteps of the Central Powers—unrestricted U-boat warfare, the 1918 Western offensive—makes encountering a more detailed narrative no less interesting. Watson speculates that, despite tremendous material shortcomings, the Central Powers might have enjoyed a position of relative bargaining strength in 1917 with the departure of Russia and Romania from the war—if not, of course, for the entry of the United States into the conflict, which inexorably tipped the balance of resources against the Central Powers.

The faulty final gasps of the Central Powers were sold to an increasingly exhausted public as efforts to bring the war to a quick conclusion. Food riots had broken out in both states; radical left agitation spiked in Germany. The German Social Democrats pressed for a negotiated peace; patience for additional war levies disappeared. Ethnic agitation reached a peak across Austria-Hungary with high desertion rates, and separatist sentiment tore the empire’s fragile fabric apart.

Anthony Paletta is a writer in Brooklyn.