World War I Love Stories Read online

  WORLD WAR I

  Love Stories

  Real-life romances from the war that shook the world

  GILL PAUL

  Introduction by AdrIAn GiLbert

  1914 saw the beginning of a war that would be fought around the world—the start of four years of relentless fighting, which would lead to the deaths of 17 million men, women, and children. The global conflict would destroy families and change lives forever.

  World War I Love Stories tells the unforgettable stories of lovers brought together or torn apart by the Great War. These are tales of romance and sometimes great tragedy, but most of all they are tales of enduring love at a time when the world was full of horror.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Robert Digby & Claire Dessenne

  When he found himself trapped behind enemy lines in occupied France, Robert knocked on the door of the Dessenne family…

  Ivor Gurney & Annie Drummond

  Annie was a pretty nurse who looked after Ivor in a Scottish war hospital, but she struggled to cope with his fragile mental health.

  Max Ernst & Luise Straus-Ernst

  Max was already making a name as an artist when war began, forcing him to put his work, and his relationship with Luise, on hold.

  Roland Leighton & Vera Brittain

  Roland and Vera were due to study at Oxford together when war began; instead he wrote poetry in the trenches while she volunteered for hospital work.

  Charlie & Valentine Boucher

  Valentine was a dressmaker living with her mother in southwestern France, when one day a wounded American soldier came hobbling up the hill…

  Ernest Hemingway & Agnes von Kurowsky

  Red Cross nurse Agnes flirted with all the men in her care, but Ernest, who was seven years her junior, fell seriously in love.

  Fred & Evelyn Albright

  Fred and Evelyn grew up near each other in Ontario and were as close as two people can possibly be—until he crossed the Atlantic to join the fighting.

  Hugh & Jessie Mann

  Hugh was a trainee minister who enlisted on his wedding day, three months before Jessie gave birth to their baby son.

  Percy & Dorothy Smythe

  Two of the four Smythe brothers from New South Wales found brides while fighting in Europe, but one would fail to return.

  Joseph & Mary Heapes

  As an Irishman who fought in the British Army, Joseph faced hostility on his return—but that didn’t deter Mary, his loyal correspondent.

  Quentin Roosevelt & Flora Payne Whitney

  Combat flying was perilous but the Roosevelt men were fiercely competitive and, to Flora’s dismay, Quentin felt he had to match his brothers’ achievements.

  J.R.R. & Edith Tolkien

  During his convalescence from a severe case of trench foot, J.R.R. began writing fantasy stories, helped by the ever-loyal Edith.

  Lloyd & Mary Staley

  Mary was disappointed that Lloyd didn’t propose before leaving Kansas, but she had no idea then how long she would have to wait to walk down the aisle.

  Jack & Adrienne Fox

  At war’s end, Jack volunteered to help bury fallen soldiers, and he met a Belgian girl, Adrienne, while dating her sister.

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  Picture Credits

  Introduction

  by Adrian Gilbert

  A map illustrating the global nature of the 1914–18 conflict, with the major European powers drawing upon the resources of their overseas empires.

  A US Army machine-gun team prepares for action on the Western Front. By 1918, America was making an important contribution to the Allied war effort.

  The Road to War

  When a European war broke out in 1914, most military experts believed a resolution to the conflict would be quick and decisive. None had any idea that it would lead to more than four years of unrelenting attritional conflict and the deaths of as many as 16 million people from around the world.

  The traditional rivalries among the major nations of Europe intensified in the latter part of the 19th century, fueled by the emergence of Germany as the major economic and military power on the Continent. And yet Germany felt deeply aggrieved by its inability to take a significant share in the vast colonial expansion in Africa and Asia, led by Britain and France. This frustration encouraged the German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and his government to issue threats of military action that alarmed the other European states. German policy consisted mainly of threats rather than action, but designed to antagonize other European nations—such as supplying arms to the Boers during Britain’s war against the Boers.

  Kaiser Wilhelm II, the autocratic and often bellicose ruler of Germany.

  France, humiliated by Germany during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), formed an alliance with Russia for mutual protection against Germany. For its own part, Germany turned to Austria-Hungary to create a competing military alliance, known as the Central Powers. The alliance system was inherently dangerous, however, as an attack by one nation on another was likely to lead to a general European war. Britain had traditionally kept out of direct involvement in such treaty obligations, but Germany’s decision to build a powerful fleet and challenge Britain’s position as the world’s leading naval power pushed Britain toward support for France and Russia.

  International tensions increased further with ill-judged German interventions in Morocco, but the real impetus for war lay in the rivalry of Austria-Hungary and Russia over control of the Balkans. The collapse of the Turkish empire in the region had led to the emergence of new independent states with predominantly Slav populations. Among these was Serbia, openly antagonistic to Austria-Hungary and its control over the Slav province of Bosnia. Russia, already hostile toward Germany and Austria-Hungary, felt a sense of kinship with its fellow Slavs in Serbia.

  The assassination on June 28, 1914, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian-Serb nationalist, led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia exactly a month later. This localized decision had swift and far-reaching consequences, as Russia mobilized its army in support of Serbia. On August 1, Germany went to war against Russia, and two days later declared war on France. On August 3, German troops marched through neutral Belgium, as part of their offensive against the French. The following day, Britain, fearful of Germany’s military domination of Europe, came out in support of Belgium by declaring war on Germany.

  SHOTS HEARD AROUND THE WORLD

  In June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, made an official visit to Bosnia, which had been incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908. The Black Hand, a Serbian-supported terrorist group, planned to assassinate the Archduke as part of its campaign to take Bosnia out of Austrian control and into a union with Serbia. As Franz Ferdinand and his wife drove through the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on June 28, they were mortally wounded by shots fired by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian-Serb nationalist. This brazen challenge to Austria-Hungary’s authority in the Balkans led eventually to a declaration of war against Serbia on July 28, 1914.

  The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, prepare to make the car journey that ended in their assassination.

  The Battles of 1914

  In August 1914 Germany deployed 1,450,000 soldiers on its western borders, organized into seven armies. Their task was to smash the opposing French forces with the utmost rapidity, and after achieving victory in the West, to turn eastward to deal with the Russians. Subsequently known as the Schlieffen Plan, the German strategy in the West called for its three large northern armies, some 750,000 men, to advance through Belgium and outflank the
French, who in theory would be held in position by the other four armies in the south. The French plan, mean-while, comprised a simple advance into German territory.

  Throughout most of August the German strategy went very much as its commanders intended. The French assaults were repulsed with heavy losses while the three attacking German armies advanced through Belgium and into northern France, inflicting a series of defeats on the French, Belgian, and British Allied forces. The Allies were forced to retreat, and, at one point, German cavalry patrols were little more than 20 miles from the outskirts of Paris. The French government fled the capital for Bordeaux.

  General Joseph Joffre, whose foresight and determination helped repel the German offensive in the West in 1914.

  German infantrymen hold a line of trenches along the River Aisne in 1914. It was on the Aisne that entrenchments first became common in the war on the Western Front.

  Fortunately for the Allies, General Joseph Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, quickly realized that his offensive on the Franco-German border had been a failure. Demonstrating great resolution in this moment of crisis, he reorganized his battered forces and instigated a daring counterattack against weak points in the German advance. The German commander, General Helmuth von Moltke, was shocked by the strength of the French attacks along his now overextended front, and on September 8 he ordered a general retreat away from Paris.

  The Germans managed to retire to a good defensive position on high ground along the River Aisne. Once there they constructed strong defenses that brought Allied progress to a halt. The devastating firepower of the latest weapons—especially machine guns and artillery—made movement in the open virtually impossible; to survive men now had to go underground. As a consequence, from late October onwards, lines of trenches were dug along the entire Front, stretching 450 miles from the Swiss border to the North Sea.

  While Germany was making its main thrust against France in the West, it adopted a defensive position in the East. The large, cumbersome Russian armies marched slowly into East Prussia, but on August 26 were trapped by smaller yet more mobile German forces around the village of Tannenberg. In a four-day encirclement battle, the Russian 2nd Army was virtually annihilated. The Germans then turned east and inflicted a second major defeat on the Russians at the Battle of the Masurian Lakes.

  These severe defeats at the hands of the Germans notwithstanding, the Russians fared better against Austria-Hungary in the south. An Austrian advance was caught in the flank, forcing the Austrians to retreat in confusion and in the process causing the loss of Austria-Hungary’s eastern province of Galicia and some 350,000 men. The Austrian invasion into Serbia was also repulsed with heavy losses. The Germans were shocked at the poor performance of their ally, and were forced to send reinforcements to bolster the wavering Austrian line.

  The crew of an Austrian field gun at the front during the fighting in Galicia in the winter of 1914–15. The Austrians fared poorly against their Russian opponents.

  The Widening War

  World War I began as a purely European conflict but the fighting was soon to spread around the globe. New theaters of war emerged as countries far from Europe found themselves inexorably sucked into the great conflict.

  HELP FROM EMPIRE

  Britain had the great advantage of being able to call upon its empire and various dominions to provide forces in the war against the Central Powers. South African and Nigerian troops took part in the campaigns against the Germans in Africa, while India supplied the bulk of the men fighting the Turks in the Middle East. Australian and New Zealand soldiers served with distinction at Gallipoli before their transfer to France, where they joined the Canadians on the Western Front. Their participation confirmed the unique contribution of the British self-governing dominions to the war, and in the process helped develop a sense of separate national identity that would lead to the full independence of these countries within the Commonwealth.

  Britain’s naval supremacy spelled doom for Germany’s now isolated overseas colonies in Africa and the Pacific, which soon fell to the Allies. The one exception was German East Africa, where the Germans under Colonel (later General) Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck continued to fight a skillful guerrilla campaign until news reached them of armistice negotiations in November 1918.

  A camp occupied by Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) troops at Gallipoli in 1915. Despite their best efforts, the Allies were never able to break out of their beachheads.

  Turkey, which had strong military links with Germany, joined the Central Powers in October 1914 and immediately attacked Russia in the Caucasus region, but to little effect. Bulgaria also joined the Central Powers, while Italy and Romania went to war on the Allied side. Of these states, Turkey was the most important, its empire stretching across Arabia and most of the Middle East, potentially threatening Allied supply links through the Suez Canal and British oil interests in the Persian Gulf. But to the Allies, Turkey also seemed to offer an opportunity to bypass the trench deadlock on the Western Front.

  The Allies intended to seize the Dardanelles—the narrow strait that connects the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara—and then push on to Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. An Anglo-French amphibious force containing large numbers of Australian and New Zealand troops, landed on the Gallipoli peninsula on April 25, 1915, as a first step to seizing the Dardanelles. Turkish resistance was fierce and, despite heavy reinforcement, the Allies were never able to break out of their bridgeheads. At the end of 1915, the Allies abandoned the operation and withdrew from Gallipoli. Further Allied offensives in Palestine and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) were also repulsed with heavy losses.

  Germany had built a powerful fleet in the years leading up to World War I, but was unable to effectively challenge the British Royal Navy on the high seas; apart from an inconclusive encounter at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, it spent most of the war in the safety of home waters. The Germans had more success with their U-boat submarine war against British merchant shipping until British countermeasures reduced the German undersea threat from mid-1917 onwards. During the U-boat campaign, however, many American ships had been sunk, and in April 1917 this persuaded the US to go to war against Germany, tipping the military balance decisively in favor of the Allies.

  German U-boats posed a major threat to Allied shipping until the summer of 1917. In this illustration, a German U-boat is sunk by US warships (top) and its surviving crew marched into captivity (below).

  The Western Front, 1915–17

  As the war entered its second year, the Allies prepared to conduct a series of offensives on the Western Front designed to expel the Germans from northern France and Belgium. During 1915 French attacks in the Champagne region and British attacks in Artois were made with the greatest determination, but territorial gains were minimal and casualties heavy. The Germans, focusing on operations on the Eastern Front, successfully remained on the defensive in the west, although a limited attack was made against the Allies at Ypres in April 1915, where poison gas was used effectively for the first time.

  In February 1916 the Germans launched a mass offensive against the French around the fortress of Verdun. The German commander’s intention was not to achieve a breakthrough but “to bleed France to death” by attacking a sector of the line the French would feel forced to defend, regardless of loss. The French were indeed determined to hold the key position of Verdun and casualties were heavy, but the Germans found that they were losing troops at the same rate as their enemy. When the battle stuttered to a close in December, both sides had suffered over a third of a million casualties each.

  In the summer of 1916, the British took the lead in a combined Franco-British offensive on the Somme. The opening of the attack, on July 1, was a disaster for the inexperienced British forces, which suffered nearly 60,000 casualties on that one day alone. Subsequently, British tactics improved and steady gains were made against the Germans, but, as at Verdun, the Somme became a byword for slaughter. As the winte
r brought the battle to a close, total casualties on both sides amounted to more than a million men.

  Heavily laden British troops advance over a shattered battlefield on the Western Front. The British took a key role alongside their French ally in fighting the Germans.

  During 1917, renewed French and British offensives on the Western Front again failed to produce the hoped-for results. The failure of the French campaign in Champagne led to mutinies within the French army, while the British attack at Passchendaele foundered in the Flanders mud.

  The trench deadlock seemed impossible to resolve, although great efforts were made to find new ways or machines to break through the enemy lines. Poison gas was developed on both sides, but its effects were diminished by the introduction of gas masks for the trench-bound infantry. Then the British developed the tank, able to cross the mud of no-man’s-land and break into the enemy’s trenches. When used in a massed formation at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917 they achieved some success, but ultimately they were too unreliable to become a war-winning weapon.

  More obvious progress was made in the air. The spindly machines of 1914, used for reconnaissance alone, became greatly improved and were used in an increasing number of ways: to correct the accuracy of long-range artillery, to photograph enemy positions, to shoot down enemy aircraft, and to bomb enemy positions and cities far behind the lines. But in the end, the war would be won or lost on the ground. As 1917 drew to a close, all the main armies were suffering from profound weariness, with little prospect of victory in sight.

  The Allies used the latest technology in an attempt to break the deadlock on the Western Front, including aircraft (see here) and tanks (see here), this example firing one of its two six-pounder guns.