From the earliest days of the conflict in 1914, powerful voices called for a negotiated compromise to end the First World War. But there arguments failed to make an impact, and the fighting rumbled on despite the mounting death toll and destruction. Why were they ignored, asks Holger Afflerbach, and was there any hope of bringing about an earlier peace?
On 28 September 1916 David Lloyd George, then Britain’s minister of war, gave an interview to the American news agency United Press that became instantly famous. Asked how long the conflict in which his nation was currently embroiled would last, and how it may end, he said: “The fight must be to the finish – to a knockout.
“The inhumanity, the pitilessness of the fighting that must come before a lasting peace is possible, is not comparable with the cruelty that would be involved in stopping the war while there remains a possibility of civilisation again being menaced from the same quarter,” Lloyd George opined. “Peace now, or at any time before the final complete elimination of this menace, is unthinkable.”
In short, Lloyd George believed it was necessary for Britain to wage war until it had achieved absolute victory. And he did so for two principal reasons. First, he blamed his counterparts in the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary for the outbreak of the First World War, and for cruelties and barbarism committed during the course of the conflict. This, in itself, made the idea of negotiating utterly repulsive. Second, the enormity of human sacrifices rendered the proposal to end the war by compromise completely unattractive. Leaders on all sides were keenly aware that something positive had to come out of the war – and only military victory could provide it.
Was there a widespread desire for absolute victory?
In 2017, the British historian David Stevenson called this mechanism ‘the war trap’ – the greater the losses, the more difficult it becomes to consider negotiations. Only victory can give a sense to the sacrifices and suffering. Governments feel that they have to justify the monumental losses by delivering tangible gains for the nation, such as swathes of new territory or a better and safer international order, modelled around their own political ideas. For Lloyd George, and politicians like him across war-torn Europe, coming home empty-handed could lead to only one conclusion: that conflict had delivered nothing but a senseless and irresponsible slaughter.
In the end, Lloyd George got his way. The end of the First World War was indeed the “knockout” he had craved in September 1916. As a result, over the succeeding decades, the idea that the conflict could have been ended early by negotiation seemed somehow redundant. Comparatively few people in the interwar period – even among the defeated nations – reflected on lost opportunities to terminate the conflict with a compromise.
What were the arguments for a compromise peace?
But that doesn’t mean that these ideas weren’t being advanced while the war raged. It simply cannot be ignored that fighting on until victory exacted a terrible toll on the victors as well as the vanquished. Around 10 million soldiers and 8 million civilians were killed. This means that, on average, more than 11,000 people lost their lives every single day of the conflict. By 1918, nearly every British household had lost a relative or friend; in interwar France much of the nation was, in the words of Australian historian Joy Damousi, in a “different intensity of mourning” for a personal loss.
Waging war, holding on, and straining every sinew for victory came at a bitter social price. It is understandable, therefore, that some contemporaries doubted the wisdom of fighting “to the finish”. Some politicians even claimed that a peace of compromise would prove more durable and stable than one dominated by a triumphant victor. Given the disastrous internal situations that Germany and Austria-Hungary faced from 1916 – as hopes of a decisive victory were fading, and the populations were beset by chronic food shortages – it’s hardly surprising that many of the voices calling for a compromise were to be found in the Central Powers.
In fact, both nations produced powerful ‘peace parties’ that made tentative enquiries to the Allies about peace from as early as the final months of 1914. These feelers culminated in an official offer of peace, presented to the Allies by the Central Powers in December 1916. Then, in July 1917, the parties of the German Reichstag – at least, a substantial majority – proposed a negotiated peace that rejected enforced annexations.
Of course, the wish for compromise was always dependent on the military situation; the better the outlook on the front line, the greater the appetite to hold on fast to territorial gains. However, there can be little doubt that, from the autumn of 1916, the Central Powers were ready for peace. The problem was, the Allies thought they could win the war, saw nothing to be gained by compromise and so rejected all German and Austro-Hungarian offers.
Who were the main supporters, and opponents, of the campaign for peace?
That the Central Powers were absolutely serious about bringing the war to an early, negotiated end is evident from the identity of those leading the campaign for peace. Prominent among them was the German Social Democrat politician Philipp Scheidemann. His was not a minority or a marginalised voice. The Social Democrats had been the largest party in the Reichstag since the last prewar elections, held in 1912, and their continuous support was considered absolutely essential for the German war effort.
In fact, Scheidemann threatened his own government with a revolution should the war be fought only for reasons of conquest – and his name became synonymous with a peace of understanding (the ‘Scheidemann peace’). In his estimation, the road to negotiation was blocked by an “international movement of warmongers”. What Scheidemann meant by this was that hardliners on one side needed their counterpart hardliners among the enemy nations to help them subdue internal opposition to the war. So, when the ‘hawks’ in Germany’s general staff – men like Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg – sought to shore up support for continuing military action, their tactic of choice was to invoke the Allies’ more sabre-rattling pronouncements.
For the likes of Ludendorff and von Hindenburg, Lloyd George’s “knockout” speech of September 1916 was manna from heaven, as they could present it as proof that compromise was utterly impossible. And that, ultimately, was Scheidemann’s greatest problem. As domestic conditions deteriorated, his minimal conditions for peace (‘status quo ante’: nothing gained, nothing lost) were garnering more support. But he and his colleagues in the German ‘peace party’ simply could not provide any evidence that the enemy was ready to talk.
Who was calling for peace beyond the Central Powers?
Not all politicians championing the cause of a negotiated settlement hailed from the Central Powers. Another politician who thought that a peace of compromise was not only possible, but even desirable, was American president Woodrow Wilson. Wilson attempted to broker peace twice: in late 1916 and early 1917, but was thwarted in his efforts by Germany’s declaration of unlimited submarine warfare in February 1917 (which was itself retaliation for the Allied refusal of the peace offer of December 1916).
In his ‘Peace without Victory’ speech of 22 January 1917, Wilson warned of the obstacles that an absolute victory would place in the way of a lasting peace in Europe: “Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished,” he declared. “It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit.”
However, once the US had entered the war in April 1917, Wilson reversed his views. By now he had only the strongest contempt for the German government, and so set aside his previous peace missions and threw his weight behind the campaign for outright victory. The president’s volte-face flew in the face of some of the advice offered by his friend and advisor, the diplomat Colonel House. Undeterred, in the summer of 1917, House suggested a compromise peace, and he did so for one striking reason: to preserve liberal Russia from collapse.
What was the situation in Russia?
The Russian Revolution that erupted March 1917 had forced the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, to be replaced by a Provisional Government. This new administration voiced a commitment to elections, freedom of the press and (in a bid to avoid placing itself at the mercy of Germany) to continuing the fight against the Central Powers. This was a great relief to Britain and France. A Russian withdrawal from the war threatened to deal the Allied campaign a huge strategic blow, and so London and Paris insisted that Moscow fight on.
Colonel House thought this a dangerous development. He wrote on 15 August 1917 that “it is more important, I think, that Russia should weld herself into a virile republic than it is that Germany should be beaten to her knees… With democracy firmly established in Russia, German autocracy would be compelled to yield to a representative government within a very few years.”
House’s point was clear. By urging the inchoate Provisional Government to battle on until victory, the Allies risked plunging Russia into something far more dangerous than a compromise with Germany: autocracy. And so it proved. The Provisional Government’s refusal to withdraw from the conflict proved disastrously unpopular among a war-weary public, and opened a window of opportunity for the Bolsheviks to seize power in the revolution of November 1917.
Who were the British figureheads in the call for peace?
This was an event that would have enormous consequences for world history. Across the Atlantic in Britain, the Conservative politician Lord Lansdowne was another statesman to divine dark consequences from the determination to fight on. Lansdowne was not at all a ‘dove’ and had voted for Britain’s entry into the war in 1914. Still, he was increasingly worried that the collateral damage of the war could bring down European civilisation.
In a ‘peace letter’ in autumn 1917 – published by the Daily Telegraph because The Times had refused to print it – Lansdowne wrote: “We are not going to lose this war, but its prolongation will spell ruin to the civilised world, and an infinite addition to the load of human suffering which already weighs upon it.” He saw the “wanton prolongation [of the war]” as “a crime differing only in degree from that of the criminals who provoked it”.
Lansdowne’s words attracted a barrage of criticism but, given the Allies’ uncertain position, they forced the hardliners to modify their attitudes. In speeches made in January 1918, Lloyd George (now prime minister) and Wilson were far more open towards a settlement with the enemy than they had been previously. In fact Wilson used his January 1918 address to formulate the famous ‘14 points’ that later became the basis for the armistice that ended hostilities.
Despite Lansdowne’s efforts, despite a peace initiative launched by Pope Benedict XV to stop the “senseless slaughter”, and notwithstanding Austro-Hungarian emperor Charles I’s attempts to start peace talks with the French, the slaughter on Europe’s battlefields continued. And when the war came to an end in November 1918, it did so with a clear military victory. For imperial Germany and its main ally, Austria-Hungary, the outcome was a disaster.
When had the ‘point of no return’ been passed?
However, the war was also a senseless waste for the Allies. They bore a great deal of the responsibility for its long duration by rejecting any attempt to settle with their enemies. In fact, the longer the war went on, the harder it became to strike an acceptable peace, since the material and moral damage caused was simply too great to repair. A ‘point of no return’ had been passed. As to when it was reached, that’s up for debate. I’d argue that, given what unfolded in Russia, it was, at the very latest, 1917.
A generation of historians has justifiably described that year as the beginning of a new epoch. Whenever we believe that the turning point arrived, there’s little doubt that the First World War challenges traditional perceptions of what military victory looks like. This was a conflict in which victory was expected to resolve political problems that to some extent had been created, and often rendered unresolvable, by the war itself. And those problems only got worse the longer the war lasted.
In his autobiography, Lloyd George argued that, on the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, “the nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay… not one of them wanted war, certainly not on this scale”. If that was the case, why was it necessary that this fight, as Lloyd George himself had put it in 1916, “must be to the finish”?
Holger Afflerbach is professor of modern European history at the University of Leeds. His books include On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War (Cambridge, 2022)