A Brief History of the Great War
In the summer of 1841, the Ottoman warlord Ibrahim Bazgil Pasha and the Austrian Archduke Johan von Habsburg convened a peace conference in Austrian occupied Sarajevo. After more than a decade of fighting and nearly a million Austrian, Turkish and French casualties, the two hoped to arrange a general ceasefire. For all of June and the first half of July, they worked out an accord that would reestablish and maintain the status quo. It was to be ratified by the Sultan Abd al'Majid and Emperor Ferdinand IV on July 22nd.
A little after midnight on July 20th, three operatives of Her Majesty's Secret Service gained entrance to the White Fort and assassinated the Archduke, along with his dinner companions. Their objective had been to sabotage the peace process, but they overshot. At the table with the Archduke was a little known cultural attaché ostensibly serving as a translator. He was, as the British discovered only later, the Chief of German Intelligence in Austria-Hungary.
The next morning, German Intelligence, acting on its own, apprehended, interrogated and executed forty-seven British nationals in Sarajevo. On the strength of the dubious information they obtained, and against the wishes of the Austrians, they then stormed the Husrev-Beg Mosque. The Pasha’s son, Ahmed, was arrested as a coconspirator in the plot and smuggled through the Carpathians to Poland. On July 28th, the Law Diet in Berlin found him guilty of murdering a German official and the Chancellor had him shot.
The peace process collapsed. Three days later, Britain declared war on Germany.
The Great War had begun.
Causes
A series of cataclysmic accidents in 1841 are the proximate cause of the Great War. Had British agents known beforehand that a high-ranking German official was dining with the Archduke the night of July 20th, diplomats still working frantically to avert an open breach may yet have succeeded. Had German Intelligence not reacted with rash and brutal reprisals, the Austro-Turkish peace process could have gone forward in spite of the Archduke's death.
But the inescapable fact is that in both London and Berlin the fervor for war had been simmering for over a decade. Shifting alliances and the mounting military and industrial might of Germany and Great Britain made the penultimate confrontation of the Great War inevitable. It did not begin with Sarajevo in 1841 but a century and one year earlier with the Kongliche Army encampment in Magdeburg and a young, dashing prince named Frederick Hohenzollern.
The Eighteenth Century and the Legacy of Frederick the Great
The Prince-Electorate of Brandenburg, 1693
The Electorate of Brandenburg's stormy history is a matter of great controversy among academics. Its first expansionary period, between 1570 and 1619, was followed by seven decades of military reversals, economic depression and international humiliation. By 1693, it had been reduced to a fiefdom of the Holy Roman Empire, surrounded on three sides by the Great Powers of Sweden, Austria and Spain. And yet, at its nadir, it found the strength and energy that would transform it into a Great Power in its own right and reshape the landscape of Europe forever.
Theories as to why and how abound. The Chancellor Otto von Bismarck regarded it as the natural expression of badly trampled German pride, something for which much evidence exists. Political and social criticism in Protestant North Germany had become fervent, melancholy and deeply confused. Radical ideas, amidst the poverty and disgrace, took a firm hold in the national imagination: Liberal reformers challenged the monarchy's insistence on absolute rule, its unaccountable ministers and brutally repressive tax collectors; the only popular, mainstream republican party in Europe during the seventeenth century arose in Brandenburg; above all, the Anabaptist movement flared up perennially in the poor, enserfed province of Kustrin and in 1688 claimed the life of King Frederick Wilhelm I. These otherwise divergent forces, as Bismarck put it, "conspired to greatness." They were held together by a "common German desire." It is no accident, certainly, that the creation of the Commonwealth coincided with the ascendancy of the Magyars, Czechs and Italians in the Holy Roman Empire, and most historians agree this played some part although they vary considerably over how large.
Other explanations are not as widely accepted. The Englishman Sir Edmond Smith proposed in a comprehensive study of Anglo-German relations published in 1827 that Brandenburg's rise was chiefly, even solely the result of English monetary and military support. This school, so-called
British revisionism, was very popular in the Isles during the intense North Atlantic rivalry of the nineteenth century, but has since waned. On the Continent, even among traditional German rivals France, Austria and Russia, it never took hold and remains unconvincing today. At the far opposite end of the spectrum, the notion of Germanic Destiny was immediately dismissed for its unwillingness to account for the contributions of Poles, Baltic peoples and the French to the Commonwealth.
Ultimately, the most persuasive theory is a combination of Bismarck's conspiracy to greatness and a sudden, violent change of leadership in 1693. Not only was Frederick I an immeasurably more competent ruler than his father, he was succeeded by greater and greater Kings and Chancellors for the next two centuries. This is taken as an accident of history, at best a confluence of events and forces within Germany, but there are certain fringe elements, conspiracy theorists and maverick historians, who believe it was far from accidental. They postulate a new power-behind-the-throne, a cabal of puppeteers, a gray eminence abler by leaps than his predecessors. One who took his seat in 1693.
Whatever the means by which it was effected, change was fundamental, drastic and rapid. Frederick ordered an overhaul of the army that took three years and cost more than a million marks, much of it financed through a careful debt policy. By 1696, he had raised just under ninety thousand men and had another fifty thousand engaged in weekly training exercises. In this manner, farmers remained available to work the fields but were also prepared and fit for military service at a month’s notice. This was to be the foundation of modern conscription and mobilization.
Frederick’s new army was not merely for show. In late ’96, he stunned Europe by declaring war on the Kingdom of Spain. This enemy was carefully selected, Sweden judged too difficult logistically and Austria too strong for the short term. Spain was enormously wealthy and commanded a much larger, much more potent military, but it was limited by the distance between Poland and the home provinces, the unwillingness of Poles to fight in large numbers for their foreign oppressors and the adept leadership of Brandenburg’s Prince von Dessau. He rapidly overwhelmed the garrisons of Krakow, Poznan and Warsaw, and then engaged in a slow, cautious defense against the waves of Spanish reinforcements that marched through the Port of Danzig. Badly outnumbered and with only limited material support, for years the Prince pursued a strategy of maneuver and delay, draining large Spanish contingents through attrition, harassment and desertion.
In 1705, however, an abortive attack on Konigsberg gave the Prince his opening-he launched a brilliant offensive campaign down the Vistula, trapping and annihilating three Spanish armies in two months. He inflicted four times his own casualties and cleared Poland of enemy troops. In 1707, facing mass rebellions at home, the Spanish King relented and ceded the rich province of Poznan and a large indemnity in the Treaty of Danzig.
The conflict lasted over a decade. In its midst, the Holy Roman Emperor finally relented and granted Frederick leave to assume the long disused royal title of his house. On January 1st, 1701 he proclaimed the Kingdom of Prussia, still subject to the Empire but no longer a diminutive part of it. This, however, was to be the last token of friendship from Vienna-as the inevitable became clear in Poland, the Emperor forced the King to severely curtail his demands. He also declined an offer of alliance and a request for material aid, stating that it was “not in his interests at this time.” This choice had the intended effect on Prussia in the immediate term, but it was to have far profounder consequences for the Empire.
In 1710, Prussian envoys in London negotiated a treaty of mutual defense and aid. The English promised six million marks over the next decade, a sum they delivered and eventually expanded to over twenty million marks by 1760. These funds allowed Frederick’s successor, Frederick Wilhelm I, known to history as the Viking-Slayer, to devise a concerted and highly effective foreign policy that relied on a combination of deft diplomacy and a small but powerful army. Warm relations with the Russian Empire of Peter the Great and France, and a grant of neutrality from the Emperor, enabled the King in the 1720’s to take on a far more ambitious project than his father’s. With English financing and the fiscal policies he inherited, Frederick Wilhelm expanded the standing army to 12o,ooo with an active reserve of 8o,ooo. He then gained English naval support against the Swedes, who in turn were supported by the Emperor. A disaster off the Dutch coast left the Swedish navy in ruins, and Prince Dessau rapidly occupied the Baltic coastline and its German-speaking cities. An invasion force was prepared to cross the Sund when Sweden sued for peace, ceding Pommerania, Mecklemburg and Danzig to Prussia and Jutland to England.
Dessau’s fame grew rapidly. In 1725, he invaded the small but still sovereign states of the Rhineland, namely Koln, Kleves and Pfalz, all of which were annexed to Prussia by 1740. His most ambitious campaign after Sweden was conducted against Bavaria, a powerful south German state he subdued in two lightning strikes in 1731 and 1732. The entire Kingdom was annexed to Prussia by the Treaty of Munich, six months before the aging Prince succumbed to fever. By the time of his death, Dessau was renowned as the Lion of Prussia, among the finest Generals of the early eighteenth century and the architect of the new officer corps that was to make Prussia’s army the best in the world. In 1730, he was promoted from Marshal (of which, during time of war, there were at least five) to Lord Marshal of the Kingdom. It was tantamount to a Ministerial post, and granted its holder an authority subordinate only to the King’s, regardless of social rank. There would be only three Lord Marshals-after Dessau, Cristoph von Schwerin and Gerhard von Blucher. All would make profound and lasting contributions to their people.
After Munich, the 1730’s were an era of peace and prosperity. With its new Baltic ports, Prussia was able, for the first time in its history, to establish an independently solvent treasury. Frederick Wilhelm legalized monopolies of salt, iron and textiles in 1731, controlled by the part-English Danzig Trading Company. In 1734, he granted the first overseas charter to the DTC and over the next six years thirteen more were given to various Prussian enterprises, including its first ever joint stock company created in 1738. In 1740, just before his death, the King opened the Danzig Exchange, the first in Germany. This era of rapid economic growth was to be greatly accelerated by his son.
News of his father’s death reached Frederick at the headquarters of the Kongliche Army in Magdburg. There, he had been assigned a colonelcy of the hussars for less than a month. It was his first real command, and many in Prussia believed that he was not experienced nor strong enough to pursue his father’s aggressive foreign policy. Moreover, his temperament, deeply influenced by French humanism, seemed to run contrary to the harsh militancy of the Viking-Slayer. Newfound wealth and a growing current of liberalism led many to celebrate these conclusions. Even the aristocracy, long forced into Enlightenment by the dismal condition of the Electorate, hoped the young son would abandon the wars of his father. They crowned the learned, cultured Frederick on May 31, 1740, so confident their desire would be realized they hailed it as the first day of the Age of Eros. The Age of Love and Fertility. They were to be massively disappointed.
It did not take long for Frederick II to associate himself with another Greek God altogether. In 1742, he forced Sweden to cede Schleswig-Holstein, its last foothold on the continent. He then raised a standing army of 2oo,ooo with a reserve of 1oo,ooo, miniscule in comparison to the armies of the Great Powers but finally a force in its own right. In 1744, he made use of it-against the counsel of all his advisers and the wishes of the Prussian people-to defend France and the Ottoman Empire, hard pressed by his Austrian overlord. He searched for a legal pretext at the Imperial Diet and, when none could be found, quit the Empire altogether. An avalanche of criticism and a severe panic in Prussia’s markets did not deter him-France, he argued, was on the verge of destruction. Intervention was not merely his royal whim-it was a political necessity and a matter of principle.
He declared war in the summer and launched a two-pronged invasion concentrated at the key centers of Austrian authority-Vienna and Prague. Field Marshal Schwerin, promoted to Lord Marshal in 1746, took one army of 6o,ooo through Silesia and into Moravia, while his adjutant, General Heinrich, passed through Erz to the Sudetland with 5o,ooo. Frederick, at the lead of just over 1oo,ooo, led a rapid march against the main body of Austrians south of the Danube. He defeated the Austrian Field Marshal von Daun at Salzburg, encircling and destroying his left flank. He took Linz and Poltan in late July, leaving Vienna open to him. It fell on August 4th.
Schwerin, meanwhile, took Prague on August 18th and prepared to march on the Ostmarch. General Seydlitz occupied Baden and Alsace. Frederick again defeated a superior Austrian army under von Daun on August 16th. The next day, having already made peace with the Ottoman Empire and France, the Emperor signed the Treat of Vienna, ceding Erz, Upper and Lower Silesia and the city and hinterlands of Luxembourg to Prussia. The war and its aftermath stunned Europe.
The Holy Roman Empire, for two centuries the premier military power in Europe, and on the verge of total victory over its arch-enemies the Turks and the French, was utterly beaten, and by the weakest of its neighbors. While the superior equipment, logistics and organization of the Prussian army, achieved through the reforms of Frederick I and Frederick Wilhelm, played some role in its victory, there was no question whatever that it was the King’s personal command that won the day. Inexperienced, young and brash, he nevertheless crushed the finest General in Europe twice and felled its foremost army. He was a natural commander, a brilliant tactician and widely regarded as the greatest strategist in history. This, the first of his campaigns, revealed his basic genius-quickly and efficiently dismantling an opponent’s army, and then its infrastructure. He risked all, but wasted nothing. In his whole career, he was not to fight a war that lasted more than four years-his preparedness, organization and incomparable speed made him an indomitable force on the battle field.
But in 1744, he was not ready to rest in his triumph, far from assured. Before the year was out, he had brought his army back to full strength and, again, increased its size. He created a system of conscription and mobilization that remains the largest and most efficient in Europe, and doubled and then tripled Prussia’s national income. Politically, he strengthened his position and his expansionistic wars with a principle he called interventionism-not simple conquest, but the preservation of Prussia’s national integrity and the furtherance of its principles by force. In a series of treatises, he argued successfully for German unification to the exclusion of Austria, the liberation of the Poles and the French and the creation of a national order. Although deeply controversial, and dismissed even by admirers as mere fantasy, he accomplished every one of the goals he outlined philosophically in the 1740’s by the time he died.
His rhetoric, and the rapid expansion of Prussian fortunes, did not go unnoticed abroad, however. Despite Frederick’s personal intervention on its behalf, France’s conservative government was deeply suspicious of its German neighbor-a suspicion that culminated with the appointment of Zeithan, Duc de Geist, the Mad Minister. His short, bloody reign saw the abandonment of the policy of English alignment, established since the 1670's, in favor of a coalition against Prussia led by the Holy Roman Emperor. The very same Emperor who had so lately sought the destruction of the French state. In St Petersburg a similar move, concocted by the insane Elizabeth I, destroyed well over a century of friendship between the North Germans and their Russian neighbors.
The coalition, mighty on paper, was doomed by the erratic, mentally ill architects who drew it. Although Frederick was fairly certain he could hold off his enemies, and perhaps subdue them, he quickly realized that they could be divided and then defeated individually. To the craven Empress, he ceded East Prussia, and to the Mad Minister Luxembourg. He then launched a rapid and decisive campaign against Austria, one that secured Baden and Alsace to Prussia and removed Austrian influence from Germany altogether.
Frederick then turned his attention to those who had betrayed him. In Russia, Elizabeth died and was ultimately replaced by Catherine the Great, a German princess who restored East Prussia without mounting a costly and doomed defense. France, however, was not so reasonable. Although the Mad Minister had died a sudden, painful death precipitated by a rare syphilic disease he contracted from a Galapagos turtle, his successors refused to restore Luxembourg and Brabant, a province they had stolen from the English Crown. Frederick, seeing no alternative, ordered a young, impetuous and by all accounts brilliant General named Gerhard von Blucher to prepare an army to march on Paris. This he did, assembling 1oo,ooo men and some 6oo guns by 1765. The King himself swept through central France, destroying the Royal Army and installing Prussian garrisons from Lorraine to the Atlantic Ocean. After five months of heavy fighting, France capitulated, restoring Brabant and Luxembourg and ceding Artois.
Frederick, however, was not satisfied, and set upon a more decisive resolution, scheduled for the fall of 1771. Before this, however, he conducted a short, long overdue campaign against the Spanish. Field Marshal Bulow was sent to Poland, while he himself contemptuously crossed French territory, quartering his men in French homes and commandeering French grain, horses and munitions. He invaded Iberia in 1769 and, after six weeks, acquired the whole of Spanish Poland. Without missing a beat, he then turned his armies on France and, in less than two months, overthrew the French government and installed a provisional governor. A year later, France held its first general election, under universal suffrage, and proclaimed the First Republic, a state that was wholly, irrevocably dependent upon the German Commonwealth. It would remain so for fifty years.
Frederick spent the final half decade of his rule cementing Prussia’s own Republic, one he had devised over the course of forty years and that has proved the most enduring system of government in Europe. In 1745, he established the German Commonwealth, made up of the sovereign states he liberated from the Emperor and many of the dominions that had been internal to Prussia since 1695. It remained a loose association of countries under the protection of the Prussian Army until 1747, when plebiscites throughout Germany, including many held illegally in the Austrian Rhineland, voted overwhelmingly to establish a national government. In 1748, Fredrick convened a Congress at Berlin and compelled its members, the rulers of various German domains, to vote a National Convention. This was held between 1748 and 1749 in the city of Dresden and was elected by universal male suffrage The King did not attend for fear his presence would jeopardize the Convention’s independence, but granted it his full support and authority. He dispatched a Prussian delegation made up almost entirely of Poles in his place. They would hold more than a third of the votes, and in this manner the King ensured the Polish minority in Kustrin, Danzig Eastern Prussia and Poznan would not be ignored. The constitution that resulted was revolutionary. It abolished the nobility altogether, and turned the governments of the Commonwealth into Republics. Prussia itself would remain an absolute monarchy until the death of Fredrick II, whereupon its hereditary ruler would become simply the constitutional monarch of Germany. A unicameral legislature, the German Diet, would be solely responsible for originating national legislation, setting the levels of taxation and tariff and ensuring accountability in the King’s government. It would be elected by all propertied men aged twenty-five years. After Fredrick, the King himself would have limited powers as Head of State, principally those of appointment and veto. The primary functions of government would be carried out by his Chancellor and Foreign Minister, and command of the national German Army would pass to the Lord Marshal. Fredrick endorsed this constitution a week after it was passed, and the German Commonwealth was founded. It has come to include the Rhinelanders and the Free French of Artois, and has made great progress. The last traces of the titled aristocracy were abolished in 1763, and, in 1779, the King declared universal male suffrage in Prussia, putting strong pressure on the Diet to pass a similar measure for all of Germany. Revisions to this basic structure have been many and varied, but its principles would endure to the present day.
Frederick also undertook another round of army reforms in his last days, creating a new organizational structure that would facilitate the mass warfare of the nineteenth century and lasted until the Great War. The Commonwealth was divided into three departments, each one with its own army, levy, supreme commander and infrastructure: the first, the Department of Germany, consisted of Bavaria, Saxony, Wuzburg, the Rhineland, Artois, Hannover, Hesse-Kessel, Oldenburg and Bremen, and was headquartered in Koln. Its peacetime strength was 1oo,ooo, and its chief responsibility was safeguarding the Republic in France. Second was the Department of the East, made up by one half Poles, one quarter Baltic peoples and Lithuanians and one quarter Prussian Germans, and headquartered in Warsaw. It was responsible for protecting Poles in Turkish Galizien and Podlasia, and guarding against another Russian invasion. Its peacetime strength was 12o,ooo.
Lastly, the Department of Prussia, made up wholly of Prussian Germans, was stationed on the Elbe in Brandenburg proper. Frederick raised it in the final years of his life, and had hoped to bring its peacetime strength to 2oo,ooo. Prussia was not, however, capable of supporting such a vast standing army without enduring great economic loss-loss the King was unwilling to take. His principle had been austere frugality-wasting no lives, no equipment, no powder. And he had, it should be remembered, accomplished all he had accomplished with an army that was never larger than 3oo,ooo, and often much smaller, dwarfed by other European powers. Even in the last twenty years of his reign, when he’d had the ability to raise and finance a much bigger force, he kept Prussia’s military light and mobile. To that end, the Army of Prussia was 1oo,ooo strong, with significant artillery support and the day-to-day patronage of the very capable Blucher, made Lord Marshal in 1773. It was the principal army of the Commonwealth-the basis for any invasion of Austria or Russia and prepared to march east or west at a moment’s notice.
The Departments of Prussia and Germany comprised five divisions of twenty thousand men, each under the command of a Major General and two Brigadiers. The General Staff consisted of a Lieutenant General and Field Marshal, whose authority extended to all officers and soldiers of inferior rank in his Department. In the East, an additional division was devoted to the defense of the Baltic, but was otherwise organized identically. All three Departments were subject to the Diet and the Chancellor and in wartime the provisional authority of the Lord Marshal, an office that was effectively Gerhard Blucher until his death in 1820 and was abolished thereafter.
The structure and military might of the German Commonwealth when Frederick the Great was laid to rest made it the foremost power in Europe. Although it faced numerous setbacks in the following decades, it was a power built to endure. And one that would have extraordinary consequences across the globe.
More than any other man, the eighteenth century belonged to Frederick the Great. His campaigns, reforms, respect for national identity and sovereignty, liberalism and foreign policy shaped it, and the military infrastructure he built became the model for the mass conflict of the next. In a fundamental sense, he created the Great War, envisioned it, prepared Prussia and the Commonwealth for it, and set the rules by which it would be fought.
The German Commonwealth, 1800
But you forget to mention about sneaky spanish attack on your islands 
