‘We took up positions in large trenches and waited,’ remembered a German private at one of these battles, the first clash at Ypres, writing one of most vivid accounts of the universal experience on both sides of the western front. ‘Finally came the command “Forwards”. We climbed out of our holes and sprinted … Left and right shells were exploding, English bullets were humming … Now the first of our numbers were falling. The English had trained their machine guns on us. We threw ourselves on the ground … We couldn’t stay there for ever.’ They raced across the field and jumped into the British trenches: ‘By my side were men from Württemberg and under me were dead and wounded Englishmen. I suddenly realized why my landing had been so soft.’ There followed hand-to-hand combat. ‘Anyone who didn’t surrender got cut down.’ The dead were everywhere. The guns formed a ‘hellish concert’, all around them ‘the howling and cracking of shells’. Yet there was a sort of beauty: ‘Only the flares still gleam and in the distance to the west you can see the searchlights and hear the constant artillery fire of the heavy armoured ships.’ He was the only soldier left alive in his group; then ‘A bullet tore its way through my right sleeve, but miraculously I remained without a scratch’ – the first of many lucky escapes that convinced him providence was protecting him. Private Hitler had survived his baptism of fire.
In the east, as Franz Josef’s forces drove the Serbian king into exile and advanced into Russian Galicia, he invited his new heir and family to join him in Schönbrunn. When the twenty-six-year-old Karl heard that Franz Ferdinand was dead, he was understandably shaken. ‘I saw his face go white in the sun,’ recalled his young wife, Zita. ‘I’m an officer, body and soul,’ Karl told her, ‘but I don’t see how anyone who sees his dearest relations leaving for the front, can love war.’ He commanded armies first against Italy and then against Russia and Romania, and was admired for his dutiful geniality. When Zita celebrated an early Austrian victory, Franz Josef, now eighty-four, shrugged. ‘Yes, it is a victory, but that’s the way my wars always begin, only to end in defeat. And this time it’ll be even worse … Revolutions will break out and then it will be the end.’
‘But that’s surely not possible,’ cried the twenty-two-year-old Zita. ‘It’s a just war!’
‘Yes, one can see you’re very young, that you still believe in the victory of the just.’
The western front was now ‘A web of dugouts, trenches with embrasures, saps, wire entanglements and landmines – almost impregnable’, recalled Hitler. In Europe the eastern and western fronts fluctuated in harmony, movement on one coinciding with stalemate on the other. Falkenhayn attacked across Flanders but was repelled with massive losses; in the east the Austrians and Germans took Poland and Galicia; then, back in the west, Falkenhayn tried to bleed the French army at Verdun in a grinding bloodbath – 145,000 Germans and 163,000 Frenchmen were killed. In July–November 1916, on the Somme, an Anglo-French offensive designed to break the deadlock was a new low in mechanized butchery: 20,000 British soldiers were killed on the first day; over the five months of the battle there were 420,000 British empire killed or wounded, 200,000 French and 500,000 German.
Hitler, now serving as a runner who ‘risked his life every day’ and won the Iron Cross, Second Class, was at the Somme, where the British tried a new diesel-powered weapon, initiated by Churchill in a bid to achieve a breakthrough: a steel box with gun turret on tracked wheels that he called a ‘caterpillar’; others preferred ‘landship’. Instead it was given a bland codename: tank. Improved models of tanks, mounted with howitzers, revolutionized warfare, recreating the momentum of charging cavalry for the mechanized era just as improved flying machines, aeroplanes, were first used for reconnaissance, though mocked by macho generals. ‘
Germany had counted on support from Italy and Romania. Instead Italy joined the Allies, fighting the gruelling Alpine ‘white war’ against Austria. To Wilhelm’s outrage, his Hohenzollern cousin Carol of Romania refused to back him.
On 29 October 1914, Enver, glorying in the titles ‘Vice-Generalissimo, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of Islam,
