1917-1919
Prelude to Revolution
_Die Zeit des Totalen Krieges
Trekhletneye Ispytaniye
Les Temps De Saleté et de Plomb
The Barren Years
The Time of Troubles _
-List of phrases used for the final three years of the Great War.
“Today the atmosphere of melancholy, heaviness, and nihilism that weighs over all of Europe depends on one sole fact: no exit can be found from the present madness”
-David Lloyd George, 1919
“The German people have themselves invented the phase “Prussian Militarism”, which signals nothing less than unselfish loyalty and surrender of the individual to the conception of the state. It was Prussian militarism that created our nation and guaranteed its brilliant development. It should not be resisted, but encouraged.”
-Erich Von Ludendorff, 1918
“The present logic of imperialist war defies the Orthodox Marxist explanation. What is this war if not a giant altar on which is sacrificed not merely the lives of Europe’s young, but also the accumulated wealth of capitalist and worker alike? Capital has long ceded the whip to the state; we confront now the rule of the haughty officer and petty nationalist.”
-Eduard Bernstein, 1918
“Ludendorff and his cronies seem to be under the impression that he may secure the consensus he needs for his plot by returning us to the 70s. No more! The Reichstag shall assert its authority.”
-Matthias Erzberger, 1918
“Russia shall organize an offensive when it pleases; if the Entente is displeased that Russia, as a great power, has the right to determine the shape of its own military operations, it is perfectly content to sue once again for peace”.
-Prince Lvov, 1917
“The supposedly proletarian government in Russia today appears to have entirely forgotten the old credo of socialist unity; Russia faces enemies at home and abroad, and yet the Bolsheviks seem most determined to vilify the faithful opposition.”
-Julien Martov, 1918
The great struggle for which we organize is that of the future of this English civilization: sacrifices shall be made, hardships endured, and many more lives lost for this task, but we shall face it solemnly without pause or hesitation.”
-Winston Churchill, 1917
“The course of the present government has been a perpetual affront to those cherished English liberties which form the cornerstone of this nation. We shall not save English civilization by tearing up its foundations”.
-JBS Haldane, 1918
“They have tried and will continue to try to kill me because we are on the cusp of breaking for once and all the hold of moloch over this American nation. We shall not surrender in this sacred struggle.”
-William Jennings Bryan, 1918
“The present war will not be halted by invocations of humanity, expressions of outrage, or the fantasy of a negotiated peace between rancorous imperialist powers. The only power that may stop the war is a concerted, general strike of the European proletariat. It is only the leading class of history that may offer some chance of redeeming it”.
-Rosa Luxemburg, 1919
“The present situation in Germany…entails that socialism is no longer the creed of a single class or interest, but the symbol of suffering humanity itself.”
-Heinrich Mann, 1919
“For a soldier who deserts his sacred obligation to Germany, a bullet in the head is a mild punishment”.
-Anonymous Prussian Lieutenant, 1919
“Whatever our disagreements with Luxemburg and Haase, today we are all socialists, and so long as they continue to exercise the forbearance which the Imperial government has denied so many, we shall remain socialists.”
-Friedrich Naumann, late 1919
Excerpts from the book: “From a War of Peoples’ to a War of States: Europe, 1917-1919”, by Enzo Traverso
Published by the Piedmont-Milan Federation of Publishing Collectives, © 1982, Milan, ESF
The historian’s habit of dividing the Great War into two periods emerges as much out of a marked shift in the nature of the war as it does out of the scholar’s natural zealotry for periodization. Perhaps the best proof of this is the multiple expressions, now well known, which were used among both belligerent and neutral powers for the final three years of the war. In both Germany and Austria, this was referred to as the time of total war; in Russia, as the three years trial; in France, among soldiers, as the years of lead and dirt; in England, at the home front, as the barren years; and even in America and a number of other neutral countries as the “Time of Troubles” or simply “The Troubled Years”.
What is the basis for the distinction between the first two and a half years of the war and the final three? This text argues that it is principally the relationship of the state to its citizens that distinguishes the two periods. In the first two and a half years of the war, which we will call “The war of peoples”, the belligerent powers were still able to count on broad popular support for the war, undergirded by the belief that the war itself was primarily defensive and that its end was approaching with the next great offensive. The latter notion was shattered by the failure of the battles of 1916 to move the belligerent powers closer to peace; the former, by the leaks of both German and British peace proposals, which revealed the sweeping annexations planned by each nation.
The final three years of the war also witnessed the turn to total war. Some revisionist scholars have argued that no principled distinction can be drawn between the “partial war” of 1914-1916 and the “total war” of 1917-1919. Particular attention is often drawn to the vast mobilization of resources that was required to launch the battles of Verdun and Lille. Yet even if it can be argued that the belligerent powers began to employ some of the methods of total war as early as 1915, the masses of Europe did not feel its full effects until the latter half of the war. It was only then that the war began to be perceived as total. A key caesura was marked by the tightening of the British blockade following the failure to renew the Alexandria Accords and the German decision to launch unrestricted submarine warfare in response to the sudden collapse of American imports. The immiseration that was inflicted upon the populations of Europe for the next three years was a direct consequence of these choices.
With deprivation on the home front and discontent among soldiers, the belligerent powers had to resort to increasingly repressive measures to control the restive masses. A new, ghastly combination of capitalist work-discipline and military drill governed the rhythms of life. States turned from mobilizing consent through propaganda to enforcing it at the end of the bayonet. For many, these years were remembered as a struggle for survival. Endemic shortages of necessities afflicted almost everybody; the crackdown on the unions robbed the working class of their means to organize, and the rapid, spiraling inflation of the war’s last two years wiped out the wealth of the middle classes, proleterianizing millions.
As the war dragged on, the struggle for survival ceased to be experienced as a strictly individual event. It started to become easier to imagine the end of the old order than it was to conceive of the present one improving. Increasing numbers of Europeans became, to use the German phrase, unterirdischmensch, “underground men”, plotting in secret the overthrow of capitalist-imperialist oppression. The language of war, pervasive in the militarized societies of Europe, took on a new tone: the call now went out for a Weltbefreiungskriege , a world-wide struggle for proletarian liberation.
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