Page - 694 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

694 The Consequences of the Russian February Revolution had described : a conflict where the aim was to impose one’s own will on the other. The will to fight was supposed to be lastingly undermined and the military war, if it could not be decided directly at the front, was to be spun out in order to bring about a moral and material exhaustion. The enormous losses and the gigantic consumption of the ar- mies, which drew on the most substantial part of the war economy, increasingly called into question the will to hold out. The total war ‘aimed at the “psychological unity” of the states’.1574 The rejection of the Central Powers’ peace note by the Entente and the description of the Allied war aims, which was vague but nonetheless emphatic, had made it clear that the Allies wanted to demand more than the Central Powers were prepared to grant them without being totally defeated. London, Paris, Rome and Petrograd took the view that those who favoured a compromise peace were only playing the German card.1575 Such a peace was regarded with suspicion because it would ultimately have left German capabilities untouched, and it was believed that an empire such as Germany, with its autocratic structures, could sooner or later start another war. The contrast be- tween the advocates of a negotiated peace and those who wanted to continue the war at all costs and strove for peace with victory, made it inescapably clear that both the Central Powers and the Allies continued to radicalise. The exponents of peace with victory could claim first and foremost that they still possessed a series of possibili- ties to extend the war and, above all, to stoke it at the periphery. The British and the French believed that they could succeed without further ado in bringing Greece into the war on their side ; the Middle East could prove to be a theatre of war, and then there was always the hope that the USA would soon enter the fray. In their response to President Wilson’s offer to mediate, the Entente powers had endeavoured to strike the right chord in the hope that it would have the desired effect on Wilson and to put forward those arguments that were designed to make sense precisely to the Americans. They informed the American President that they were waging war ‘in order to liberate Europe from the brutal grip of Prussian militarism’. It was furthermore a question of liberating the Italians, the Slavs, the Romanians and the Czecho-Slovaks from foreign rule.1576 Independently of this, the Russian Tsar again informed his troops of his war aims on 25 December 1916 by referring to Constantinople and the Turkish Straits and by holding out the prospect of a united Poland. The Russians and the French came to an understanding to the effect that the French would support Russia’s territorial desires on the latter’s western border, whilst the Russians likewise showed understanding for French demands for the Saarland.1577 The moment the Central Powers set about deploying Polish forces in the wake of their Polish Proclamation, the Allies did not want to wait to see whether this undertak- ing would actually be crowned with success. They began for their part to be on the look- out in prisoner camps and émigré circles for the purpose of establishing legions and