September 25, 2024

Writing the Fifth Volume of The World Crisis

Finest Hour 201, First Quarter 2023

Page 08

By Nick Lloyd

Nick Lloyd is Professor of Modern Warfare at King’s College London, based at the UK Defence Academy in Shrivenham, Wiltshire. He has written extensively on British military and imperial history, and is currently writing a trilogy on the First World War. The first volume, The Western Front, was published in 2021 and the second volume, The Eastern Front, will be published in 2024.

Winston Churchill’s epic chronicle of the First World War, The World Crisis, was published in five volumes between 1923 and 1931. The first four volumes told the story predominantly from the perspective of the Western powers, with Churchill as one of the most important protagonists, but the fifth volume was different. It concerned the war in Eastern Europe, where Austria-Hungary and Germany faced Russia and Serbia. The Eastern Front first appeared in 1931. Churchill intended to “give a general account of the whole War upon the Eastern Front, and the distant cannonade in France breaks only fitfully upon the ear. The primary theme arises in Vienna and covers the agonies of Central Europe. The familiar events in the West are seen only in their reactions upon the Eastern Front.” He believed that it was not until he had studied the war in the east that he “began to see the tragedy in its completeness.”¹

The Eastern Front is perhaps the least widely read of all the volumes of The World Crisis, of only partial interest to Churchill scholars, but it has remained one of the few dedicated accounts of its subject-matter and is worthy of further study because of the light it shines on Churchill’s view of the First World War, as well as his writing style. Churchill started work on the volume in January 1930, shortly after he had returned from a three-month tour of the United States and Canada, and when he was getting ready for a bruising campaign against political reform in India. In a letter to his publisher, Mr. Thornton Butterworth, on 12 January, Churchill explained what he was hoping to achieve: “In the previous volumes of the World Crisis I have described only in a few pages the course of events in the Eastern theatre. They have merely been the background of our main drama of the war. But now I think I might write a volume called ‘The Eastern Front,’ which would be separate from but supplementary to our five volume history. It would appeal to the same public as have purchased that work in its successive volumes. But in it the West would be the background and the East the main theme.”²

Churchill would concentrate on the war between the Central Powers and Russia—a kind of mirror image of what happened in France and Belgium. As was typical of other volumes of The World Crisis, there was a heavy focus on the first few months of the war. Churchill described, in remarkable detail, the massive battles of manoeuvre between the Russian, German, and Austro Hungarian Armies at Komarow, Rava Russka, Tannenberg, the Masurian Lakes, and Gorlice Tarnow (amongst other engagements). The fighting in the Balkans was also covered until Serbia’s fall in late 1915, as was the great Russian offensive of the following year, named after its commander General Aleksei Brusilov. The Eastern Front concludes with the fall of the Tsar the following spring (although Churchill had written briefly on Russia in the fourth volume of The World Crisis, which was entitled The Aftermath 1918-1928).

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The opening chapter, “The Dusk of Habsburg,” sets the scene in typically grandiose fashion, reminding the reader of the enormity and horror of what was going to happen and its tragic futility. “All three empires, both sides, victors and vanquished, were ruined. All the Emperors or their successors were slain or deposed….Nothing was gained by any. They floundered in the mud, they perished in the snowdrifts, they starved in the frost.” This sense of futility pervades the text, and Churchill was keen to remind readers that it was “incomparably the greatest war in history. In its scale, in its slaughter, in the exertions of the combatants, in its military kaleidoscope, it far surpasses by magnitude and intensity all similar human episodes.”³

The Writing

Whereas for the other volumes of The World Crisis Churchill had been able to draw upon copious amounts of documentation, as well as his own experience of government, The Eastern Front posed more difficult problems. It was fought by armies that did not speak English and where it was much more challenging to acquire reliable source material, particularly in notoriously secretive Soviet Russia. Churchill had little choice but to rely upon the relevant volumes of the German and Austrian official histories (Der Weltkrieg 1914 bis 1918 and Österreich Ungarns Letzter Krieg 1914–1918 respectively), while also mining the published memoirs of the most important characters. These included the German generals: Paul von Hindenburg, Erich Ludendorff, Erich von Falkenhayn, and Max Hoffman; the Russian Aleksei Brusilov; and former Austrian Chief of the General Staff Conrad von Hötzendorf.

Conrad’s memoirs were particularly valuable because they contained much vital correspondence in the run up to the war that allowed Churchill to recreate the decision-making process in Vienna in the months after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo in June 1914. Churchill was particularly anxious to cite Conrad’s extensive memoirs, even writing to his publisher in Vienna: “So little is known in England of the War on the Eastern front that I am anxious to give in my new volume a really good account of the course of events; and it is for this reason I desire to make available to English readers some of the interesting and important records contained in Feldmarschall Conrad’s book.”⁴

Churchill was assisted in the task of gathering and interpreting material by a number of collaborators, most notably Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hordern, a retired Royal Engineer who knew German, Italian, and French. He had been recommended to Churchill by Sir James Edmonds, who was then working on the multi-volume British Official History of the Great War. Churchill agreed and soon hired Hordern, who helped to assemble sources and provide translations. “I am much interested in the two enclosed articles from the Army Quarterly … .I have marked in red on the right hand side of the paper certain passages. If you could get a shorthand writer and translate those passages at much fuller length, I could make my own extracts from them,” was the kind of request that Churchill directed regularly to Hordern.⁵ Edmonds offered more specific military advice, and Churchill would often invite him down to Chartwell to discuss matters. “I wonder if you could come and spend a week-end from Saturday the 6th to Monday the 8th with us here?” Churchill asked Edmonds on 21 November 1930, in what was a fairly regular occurrence, “I would get Hordern to come down and we could have a talk about the Eastern Front….I have got a lovely map.”⁶

The Purpose

One of the main purposes of the book was to provide an adequate account of Russia’s participation. As an ally of France and Britain, Russia provided the superiority of manpower that was so crucial to the Triple Entente, and Churchill wanted to ensure that Russian sacrifices were properly recognised, even dedicating the volume to “Our Faithful Allies and Comrades in the Russian Imperial Armies.” A point of particular sensitivity for Churchill was what the Russian Army could have achieved had it been adequately supplied by the West. Churchill’s views on the Dardanelles campaign and the glorious possibilities that it presented were a major theme throughout The World Crisis, and he also returned to this in The Eastern Front. Describing the effect of securing Allied control of the Black Sea, Churchill noted that “Russian troops would then flow freely southwards to animate the Balkan confederacy. British and French munitions with the world markets and the oceans behind them would revive and multiply the Russian armies.” The “spoils of the Turkish Empire” would then be at the mercy of the Allies, freely given to Italy, Greece, and Romania.⁷

Churchill’s initial outline of the book seems to have had a wider and longer chronological spread than the final version. Early drafts had fourteen chapters, with the final six chapters covering the war from 1916, including an analysis of two contrasting Russian figures: Alexander Kerensky, who tried to keep the Provisional Government alive, and Vladimir Ulyanov (“Lenin”), the radical Bolshevik who brought about the “entire collapse of the Russian front.” The book would end with “The final German effort” on the Western Front in 1918, “the internal breakdown of the Central Powers,” and “the ruin, confusion and anarchy in which the people of Middle Europe sank at the end of 1918.”⁸

At some point the sheer scale and enormity of the campaign in the east seems to have forced a curtailment of this plan because much of the original scheme was never completed. Instead of fourteen long chapters, Churchill split the text into twenty-four shorter ones, only three of which were concerned with the events of 1916–17. Tellingly, both Kerensky and Lenin, who were originally to have had entire chapters devoted to them, were only mentioned a handful of times in the text, indicating that Churchill may simply have run out of time and space to complete the manuscript in the way that had originally been intended.

The Result

Notwithstanding the gaps in the story, Churchill worked steadily on The Eastern Front and by the spring of 1931 began to send proofs to selected readers. Maurice Hankey, the former secretary of the War Cabinet, was given the manuscript (up to Chapter 21) and was impressed. Once he started, he wrote, “I could not put your book down”:

[These chapters] are fully worthy of the earlier volumes—in fact I believe that, if possible, they are of even higher quality….Nowhere else have I seen the events of the Eastern Front, which was so obscure to us at the time of their occurrence, brought into perspective with the War as a whole. Above all, what I most appreciate is the way the problems of the Supreme Control, first on one side and then on the other, are depicted and clarified. The marshalling of the facts and the general presentment of this tremendous story are masterly beyond criticism and possess the unexpected quality of novelty….I prophesy a tremendous réclame to this volume.⁹

When Hankey was eventually sent the concluding chapters, he agreed that they were excellent, but left him wanting more. “The brilliancy of the earlier chapters is well sustained,” he wrote, “although I have the impression that the final stages of the story are told in less detail than the earlier episodes. The interest, however, never flags.”¹⁰

The chronological span was not the only limitation. When Churchill’s outline was given to Edmonds, he emphasized that it would be “very desirable” to include the fighting on the Italian Front, which continued in fits and starts from May 1915 to November 1918, as well as the story of the Allied expeditionary force at Salonika. Given these additions, Edmonds realised that the volume needed to be more comprehensive. “There is so much history regarding the Eastern front still to be written in English,” he wrote, “that it seems worth considering whether this volume might not be made the first of two written rather more fully?”¹¹ Edmonds thought that the peripheral campaigns, in Italy (which absorbed most of the Austro-Hungarian Army by 1918) and in Macedonia (where Bulgaria collapsed in September 1918), were central to the story of the Eastern Front, which could not be told by just concentrating on Russia. Churchill, however, chose not to include these campaigns in the book and kept it as a single volume.

The Eastern Front would remain, in a sense, unfinished. There would be no detailed account of the Italian Front or the fighting in Salonika, nor would the book include much beyond the year 1915. By July 1931 Churchill had completed about 110,000 words, split into twenty one chapters, and was working to a total of about 125,000 words in twenty-five chapters (there would eventually be only twenty-four).¹² At that point his earlier chapters were already being proofed and negotiations were ongoing for serialization in The Times, which forced him to bring the text to a rapid conclusion. Quickly wrapping up the campaign in the final three chapters, Churchill was already moving on to other projects. By August 1931, he was on holiday in Biarritz and looking forward to starting his next book, a biography of the Duke of Marlborough. “Thank God it is finished,” he wrote to his Private Secretary, Edward Marsh.¹³ It was finally published in November 1931.

The Reception

The reception to The Eastern Front was favourable, if not uncritical. “Seldom have his brilliant literary gifts been more effectively exploited,” reported the American Historical Review.¹⁴ Writing in the New York Times, A. M. Nikolaieff was impressed by the scale of the book: “This panorama is not only highly interesting, it is extremely enlightening. It is interesting because the intricate strategic situations and the complex operations of the armies, which occupy the greater part of the narrative, are described in a way which makes them plain even to a lay reader. It is enlightening because many important military facts are here revealed and illuminated—facts which have hitherto been either misrepresented, or known only to special students….” Nikolaieff had some concerns about Churchill’s interpretation of Russian fighting strength, arguing that he failed to appreciate how weak the Tsar’s divisions were in artillery and air power, citing his lack of Russian sources for this misunderstanding. In conclusion, “Mr Churchill has rendered a great service to the history of the World War by his invaluable contribution, but the full story of the huge struggle on the eastern front still awaits its historian.”¹⁵

Notwithstanding this positive reception, The Eastern Front never attained either the prominence or the sales of the preceding volumes of The World Crisis. This may have been because of political and domestic upheaval, such as the formation of a National Government under Ramsay MacDonald in November 1931 (the month the book was published), or perhaps it was a reflection of wider disenchantment with war literature. This had been a concern of The Times in discussions with Churchill over the serialization of the book, and the newspaper eventually declined, citing worries that readers were “responding less and less to War History,” which probably affected sales.¹⁶ Mr. Butterworth was quick to write to Churchill on 19 November warning him that it “has not done as well as we expected” and they were already £500 on the “wrong side” of Churchill’s £2,500 advance.¹⁷

Churchill had done what he could to bring this part of the First World War to a wider audience. He had written a seminal account of the Eastern Front, which may have been limited in some respects, but was fully deserving of the acclaim it received. The Eastern Front remains a remarkably clear distillation of a campaign of great complexity and intensity, helping generations of readers to understand the “other” First World War and recognise the great sacrifices that were made by the Russian Army in its ultimately doomed campaign against the Central Powers. Churchill had achieved what he had set out to do, and his work is a constant reminder that without appreciating the Eastern Front, it is not possible to understand the Great War at all.

Endnotes

1. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. V, The Eastern Front (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931), p. 7. A sub- sequent edition was published in 1937 by the Keystone Library with the title The Unknown War.

2. Churchill to Thornton Butterworth, 12 January 1930, CHAR 8/270, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge.

3. The Eastern Front, p. 17.

4. Churchill to Rikola Verlag, 20 July 1931, CHAR 8/287.

5. Churchill to Charles Hordern, 12 December 1930, CHAR 8/270.

6. Churchill to J. E. Edmonds, 21 November 1930, CHAR 8/270.

7. The Eastern Front, pp. 284–85.

8. “The World Crisis: The Eastern Front. Scheme,” CHAR 8/270.

9. Maurice Hankey to Churchill, 11 August 1931, CHAR 8/287.

10. Hankey to Hordern, 18 August 1931, CHAR 8/288.

11. “The World Crisis: The Eastern Front. Scheme. Notes,” 17 March 1930, CHAR 8/270.

12. Churchill to H. J. Bourne, 5 July 1931, and Churchill to W. Lints Smith, 7 July 1931, CHAR 8/287.

13. Churchill to Edward Marsh, 7 August 1931, CHAR 8/287.

14. “The Unknown War,” American Historical Review, vol. 37, no. 4 (July 1932), pp. 762–63.

15. “The Staggering Panorama of War on the Eastern Front,” New York Times, 29 November 1931.

16. Lints Smith to Churchill, 10 July 1931, CHAR 8/287

17. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. V, 1922–1939 (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 416, n. 3.