A social revolution, a technological episode, and a mirror of the modern age.
Military history as a discipline is not generally comfortable with syncretic overviews. Two recent examples: The hypothesis of a distinctively “Western way of war” has become more a target than a model, while the concept of “military revolution” has become an academicians’ rented mule: poked, prodded, and parsed until reified beyond real meaning. But together, these two shopworn concepts do cast light on a particular episode in recent military history: the years from 1789 to 1918—the Age of Mass War.
War-making in Europe during the century and a quarter between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I was shaped by three fundamental factors: size, energy, and sustainability. First, armed forces metastasized as a consequence of a population expansion beginning in the 18th century that produced an increasing number of males who survived into young adulthood in reasonably good health. At the same time a developing agricultural revolution and a proto-industrial revolution were altering methods of production by reducing dependence on human muscle power through the increasing number of stronger work animals and effective machines. Economic prospects for young males correspondingly tended to decline. The resulting migration from land to city helped produce the human raw material for the Age of Mass War.
Maintaining that human material, on an ever – enlarging scale, was another story. The Enlightenment is generally described as an era of restraint, control, balance of power, and limited war. Underpinning these social trends, however, was an ethic legitimating the use of force for purposes defined as benefitting humanity. States began to develop planned economies, including comprehensive tax systems and mercantilist commercial policies to increase public wealth for mutual benefit. Collecting money systematically and nonviolently became the nexus of a revised social contract: the government provided citizens protection in exchange for their services—financial or physical. Dispersing the funds relatively efficiently and honestly was the responsibility of administration; bureaucracies were correspondingly enlarged, their work rationalized and supervised. Emerging notions of nationhood and patriotism gave administrative routines a higher purpose. The resulting fiscal-military state, as it emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries—especially in Europe—provided the Age of Mass War’s institutional framework.
Another element of size in mass war was affirmative, large-scale participation. Early modern armies and fleets had solid cores of capable and willing technicians of war—professionals, in a sense. Hunger may have been the best recruiting sergeant, but peacetime living conditions in the military were comparatively agreeable and wartime risks were acceptable in the ordinary contexts of lower-class life. Yet mass armies could not be sustained by professionalism alone. They required individual awareness and commitment. By 1918 survival and victory de pended less upon adrenalin-fueled brute force than upon small groups moving and coalescing flexibly, seeing and seizing opportunities as they developed, and cooperating to complete a job in the most effective way.
Awareness and commitment were provided by the young men who, suddenly, were no longer surplus to social requirements but instead had become valuable social capital. In peacetime, awareness and commitment served them as survival mechanisms; youths in the competitive urban environments were well advised to be alert to opportunities and to the ideas underwriting them. It was that kind of awareness that, in the era of the French Revolution, transmuted what began as limited-circulation ideas—liberty, equality, and fraternity—into mass ideologies. The result was an era of revolution, and of revolutions.
Reacting to the watershed French experience, Prussia, Spain, even Great Britain, developed new identities—identities that began the process of transforming subjects to citizens, moving them from passivity to proactivity. The French levée en masse of 1793 was incomplete and temporary, but its defining idea of comprehensive public service structured by government did create a matrix for sustainable mass armies. Subjects had hitherto interacted with government through its regulatory aspects: taxation and conscription. But with Revolutionary Napoleonic France showing the way, bureaucracies in the first half of the 19th century developed into management systems, systematically coordinating institutions and policies to produce specific objectives: Governments operated schools and railroads. Governments delivered mail and newspapers. Governments assumed responsibility for policing and firefighting. And as public administration became an acceptable part of everyday life, governments increasingly recognized the advantages, indeed the necessity, of public participation. The growing middle classes enjoyed expanded voting rights, enhanced social status, and legislation sympathetic to economic development. Peasants saw feudalism abolished everywhere but in Russia. If working conditions remained harsh, workers became increasingly involved in the political process. Above all, national armies and navies became central manifestations of public identity, central symbols of citizens’ relationships with national governments, even in countries like Britain and France, where military service was still widely understood as the milieu of career professionals. In the 1870–1871 Franco-Prussian War, Prussia demonstrated so convincingly that its “participants” made formidable non-career soldiers that by 1914 they were the norm in Europe and by 1916 in Britain as well.
As military service became central to public participation in the state, armed forces further contributed to the Age of Mass War by providing a generally acceptable male rite of passage. While the changes wrought by the French and Industrial Revolutions had diminished or devalued most traditional initiation processes, completing peacetime military service legitimated a young man’s social standing and entitlement for marriage, a permanent job, a place in the tavern. That service could be demanding—an easy rite of passage is a contradiction in terms—but the success of each soldier in a conscript system ensured that the system would endure. Washouts were considered exceptions.
Military participation thus expanded citizens’ sense of civic and ethnic unity. During the Great War men from 17 to 50 were systematically and successfully brought into uniform. The British Army even formed two entire divisions of “Bantams”: men below—some well below—the regulation height of 5 feet 3 inches. Throughout that war, imperial loyalties held surprisingly firm compared to national ones: the Habsburg army fought well despite incorporating a dozen formal languages, to say nothing of dialects. To the Great War’s end its soldiers proved able to endure the unprecedented demands and hazards of industrial war and willing to accept its collective constraints; at the same time, the soldiers’ individuality was preserved and became a decisive element for success.
Mass war’s second fundamental characteristic was an energy revolution that began in the late 18th century and exploded in the 19th. Fundamentally it involved the displacement of muscle—and its auxiliaries wind and water—by artificial sources of power. Beginning humbly with wood, the energy revolution progressed to the coal that fueled factories, railways, steamships. By the century’s turn, oil was emerging as an alternate primary-power source, and by 1918 it was the decisive raw material of World War I. Oil, through its use in internal – combustion engines, enabled the introduction of unprecedented combat technologies: tanks and aircraft. It also enabled the motor transport that supplied troops and mobilized weapons everywhere from Flanders to Mesopotamia and East Africa. It powered a new generation of warships with greater range and performance.
Coal and oil were joined in the energy revolution by their godchild, electricity. By midcentury the transmission of current, initially a laboratory exercise, had progressed sufficiently to enable long-distance communication by wire—the telegraph. Improved generators powered telephones and electric lights. Larger, more reliable generators ran commercial power plants, and by 1918 electric power enabled mass warfare’s nervous system: Electricity ran radios, battleships’ guns and their turrets, submarines. Electricity allowed headquarters and hospitals to operate around the clock and illuminated nighttime operations of all kinds.
Coal, oil, and electricity are generally and legitimately understood as liberating males for long-term military service—both directly and by physically enabling women to staff munitions factories and drive streetcars. But the energy triad also transformed ways of thinking and feeling about war and war-making: Coal power still demanded some muscle power, but oil power and electricity depended for operational effectiveness on individuals’ mental and emotional alertness. For centuries the countryman, the peasant—physically hardy and able to endure hardship and danger—had been considered the backbone of Europe’s armies, while intellectual awareness and activity were not considered priorities for the rank and file. But by 1918 this peasant paradigm was becoming not only obsolescent but, when confronted with the challenges of driving a truck, serving on a battleship, or flying an airplane, a liability. In the U.S. Navy, for example, the introduction of oil to the major warships freed crews from the drudgery of coaling, enabling and encouraging men to improve skills and develop new ones. Eventually, such new patterns of initiative contributed significantly to military effectiveness—a trend especially notable during World War II. On the battlefield, culturally based initiative and independence—often ascribed to the Australians and Canadians, to the bare-chested cold-steel “in together or die together” ethos of the Italian arditi, to the transcendence through willpower of high-tech war by “overmen” like Germany’s Ernst Jünger—can be understood as acculturations to mass war’s energy revolution: Individual soldiers opted for challenge and synergy instead of submission and submergence.
That mass war’s energy revolution enabled mass production is another familiar and accurate cliché. But mass production means not merely more of everything, and not just more of the same old thing. It revolutionized agriculture: Mechanization and chemicalization exponentially increased output per unit of land, especially across east and central Europe, and facilitated Europe’s survival when the Great War disrupted food imports.
The advent of mass production affected mass warfare in other far-reaching ways: First, it changed the nature of industrial production. Traditional emphasis on durables gave way initially to what might be described as unplanned obsolescence, then to the genuine article. Scientists and tinkerers, industrial designers and shade-tree mechanics developed improvements and novelties in an economic environment expanding just enough to encourage expanding consumption at all social levels, and that pattern extended from cottages to palaces and above all to war ministries. Prior to the mid-19th century, material innovation in the armed forces tended toward very gradual push-pull. Something exponentially different—whether the Italian trace in fortification, the Gribeauval system in artillery, or the needle gun in small arms—would appear and be acknowledged but then take a generation or two or three to permeate military systems that preferred waiting for the best rather than taking the first.
After 1860 that situation was reversed. Navies became “fleets of samples,” one-of designs waiting to be supplanted by next year’s model. Armies that would have replaced weapons systems once a decade or generation later began discarding them like dated fashions (indeed, uniform styles became more stable than firearm designs). Rifles developed from converted muzzleloaders using black powder to smokeless-cartridge magazine weapons. Cannons developed from muzzle-loaders on fixed carriages to breechloaders on hydraulic recoil mounts, like the renowned Model 1879 French 75, with rates of fire as high as 15 to 20 rounds a minute—operating so smoothly that a glass of water on the gun wheel might remain unspilled. Britain went through five generations of standard infantry rifles between 1871 and 1914. France and Germany each replaced their entire field artillery equipment twice—both hideously expensive propositions.
Nor was this a matter of keeping up with the military Joneses. The disastrous consequences of falling behind were demonstrated in 1870, when France pitted its array of muzzle-loading cannons against Prussia’s cast-steel breechloaders. Those consequences were reinforced across the globe as non-Western forces grew unable to keep the field against technologically up-to-date imperialists. Think Omdurman and the Maxim gun in 1898. As for navies, even before the 1906 Dreadnought revolution, capital ship construction had evolved from one at a time into an international competition resulting in classes of as many as nine vessels rendered collectively obsolescent in turn within as few as three years.
A second consequence of industrial mass production was that the awareness of its fruits—the availability of, say, thousands of standardized cannons and of millions of rounds of ammunition—triggered changes in military leaders’ thinking about how to conduct a “winning” campaign. New and often more destructive strategic and tactical possibilities opened up.
A third consequence of mass production emerged during the Great War years, 1914–1918. The war is often described as a “war of attrition,” and early on it was characterized by shockingly high numbers of casualties, as on the Somme where in a single day—July 1, 1916— some 60,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. Similar casualty rates continued in such battles as Verdun. The attrition, in short, was in human lives. But as losses mounted and manpower resources dwindled, the attrition shifted to military hardware. By war’s end, British, French, and German armies had reduced the number of warm bodies per division. Given the ongoing achievements of mass production, the armies could more readily afford to lose equipment than men.
Coal, oil, and electricity combined to enable not merely mass transportation but systematic mass transportation. It became not only possible but necessary to determine the arrival of ships by hours and the routing of trains in terms of minutes. During World War I truck convoys were added to the transport mix from France to Mesopotamia, where the Model T Ford bade fair to re place the mule and the camel by 1918. Terrain and weather became secondary factors, to be overcome in order to maintain schedules. The Age of Mass War was increasingly measured not in days but in hours, minutes, seconds. Scheduling became only one element of a comprehensive “culture of time” that during World War I structured systems from national mobilizations to trench raids and made watches more necessary than weapons, even for junior officers. Even the dash and initiative increasingly emphasized before and during World War I as a counterpoint to material power depended heavily on timing; fire support, movement to contact, the final attack itself could not be regarded as random, spur-of-the-moment, self-contained events.
The energy revolution’s final contribution to the Age of Mass War was its replacement of subsistence by surplus. War had always been a wasteful process relative to the societies that sustained it and the systems that waged it. That waste was the basis of the aphorism that amateurs discuss tactics and strategy while professionals emphasize logistics. Mass production and mass transportation replaced scarcity with abundance—not universally, but as a norm desirable in reality and attainable in principle. The Western Front, particularly in northern France and Flanders, was by 1915 a junkyard and by 1918 a throwaway zone, where matériel of all kinds was far more expendable and disposable than increasingly limited manpower. The same pattern even developed in the war’s outer theaters. As far away as German East Africa, Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s logistically isolated Askari were able to maintain themselves comfortably with captured British resources.
The emergence of surplus segues into the third factor underlying mass war: sustainability. Europe’s wars since the Classical Age had tended toward attrition rather than decision, in large part because societies’ ability to support war was exhausted before their willingness to make war. As historian James Lacey has observed, wars mostly ended when one side or the other ran out of money. That began to change with the emergence of management. The Industrial Revolution’s increasingly complex networks of financing, production, and distribution required not only the supervision of routine operations but effective responses to the unexpected. Management— the systematic coordination of institutions, systems, and policies to produce specific results—was a key to survival in the competitive, entrepreneurial, private enterprise rags-to-riches matrix at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Military systems introduced it early, almost in spite of themselves.
The heroic vitalism of earlier eras did not disappear with these changes. Indeed, it arguably did not even erode: Experience-based decision making, romantic heroic leadership, and privileging common sense over theory all endured in armed forces during the Age of Mass War. But the warrior spirit was transmuted, forged into a massive blade from the entire material and moral resources of a state and its people. Armed forces had grown too big and too complex to leave to custom and tradition. The scale and the persistence of war between 1789 and 1815 had shown the necessity of systematic, continuing preparation and the instruments enabling preparation, like accurate maps and accessible records. Instead of being a craft best learned by practice or the manifestation of an inherent spark of genius (the respective images of Wellington and Napoleon), command was developing into a skill that—for good and ill—borrowed increasingly from the concepts of management developed in the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-19th century improvised warfare was a thing of the past, a lesson roughly learned during the years of the American Civil War. Armies failing to recognize that fact were likely to be brutally reminded of it, as the French were in their 1870 collision with the Prussians, the British in South Africa in 1898, the Germans in front of Ypres in 1914.
Napoleon’s personal staff set an organizational pattern that Prussia’s general staff expanded and that hard experience underwrote. But it is important to note that the Prussian-German staff model, with its emphases on principle and planning, remained an exception, more respected than actually imitated. The prevailing staff model that developed between 1870 and 1918 focused down: on the details of mobilization, concentration, logistics, and even tactics. Its archetypical structure was that of France: Individual sections dealt with manpower, intelligence, operations, and supply; and the chief of staff was more the commander’s adviser and amanuensis than an independent source of ideas. This structure tended toward the bureaucratization of management characteristic of the Great War, which was no less dependent on typewriters than on machine guns.
Between 1789 and 1918, to a greater degree than at any time in the history of war, command at all levels was shaped by the wide gap between receiving information via cutting-edge technology—radios and aircraft—and being able to act on it with armies still largely muscle powered. Imperturbability, what Napoleon called “two o’clock in the morning courage,” correspondingly supplanted quick reactions as a primary requisite of command effectiveness. The ideal of imperturbability was best expressed by Sir Ernest Swinton in his pre–World War I short story, “Point of View.” It features a near-future headquarters where maps and reports reflect desperation. No one can find the commanding general. At twilight he appears with a fishing rod and a fresh-caught trout. He glances at the map and determines that the situation is well in hand. The message was to keep a clear head and an unclouded perspective. The British phrase for it was “a safe pair of hands.” Modern marketing calls it “routinized response behavior.” In the Age of Mass War this was a response and an enabler. Translated to the battlefields of World War I, it produced a war of nuances, of details, of planning—and repeated demonstrations of the adage that no plan survives contact with an enemy.
Management enabled mass war in another important way, by establishing cultures of competence. In general terms, during peacetime at least, armed forces in the Age of Mass War managed their routines effectively. Even during the Great War, norms of competence persisted: Rations arrived in the front trenches. Casualties were treated and evacuated. Mail was delivered and leave was systematic. A strong case can be made that by sustaining a visceral sense that the system knew what it was doing, even in the face of massive evidence to the contrary in specific incidents, cultures of competence did at least as much as discipline, comradeship, and patriotism to send men over the top repeatedly for four years.
Size, energy, and sustainability combined to produce the Age of Mass War’s defining image and its defining reality: attrition. Unprecedented quantities of men and matériel, with unprecedented degrees of sustainability, were able to destroy each other to unprecedented extents—and keep on doing it. The operational triangle of mobility, protection, and firepower, historically with roughly symmetrical sides and angles, hardened between 1789 and 1918 into an obtuse form with firepower as the widest angle. Between 1914 and 1918 the German infantry’s firepower alone multiplied by a factor of 18, and this was not atypical for all the combat arms of all the major combatants. Virtu, whether expressed as courage or cunning, took a corresponding second place to weight of shells and number of bodies. Not until mid-1918 did the British develop a doctrinal, institutional, and technological synergy among infantry, artillery, tanks, and aircraft. These primitive combined-arms teams were able to do no more than lurch forward in stages, pushing back the German front as opposed to breaking through it. But, partially powered by oil and partially coordinated by radio, they were the first step to transforming the Age of Mass War into the Age of Energy War.
Dennis Showalter, professor of history at Colorado College, has published widely on military history. His latest book is Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk (2013), and he is currently writing a book about mass war.
Originally published in the April 2014 issue of Military History Quarterly. To subscribe, click here.
