by Simon Winder
From 1871 to 1914 both sides tried to work out a solution which, given how long this period proved to be, was both urgent and yet oddly deferred. General Bazaine, who spent the rest of his life in exile, became the great hate figure for the French – his fatalism and passivity had resulted in the death or captivity of 180,000 French troops at Metz. A policy of relentless aggression was the obvious response to Bazaine’s shameful example – a vast French offensive to liberate Alsace and Lorraine and then threaten Baden. As with the Prussians in 1870, the hope was for a cataclysmic, decisive battle quite near the French border as, if the Germans did not prove cooperative, the idea of a drifting and dispersed offensive, marching through dozy swathes of Swabia, many miles from any serious population centres, seemed unlikely to be war-winning.
The Germans became a victim of one of Wilhelm II’s idiocies. It has to be remembered that while he was a charming initiator of building projects such as Schloß Hochkönigsberg and the Roman camp at Saalburg, he was a despairingly useless ruler. Bismarck had a secret ‘reinsurance’ treaty with Russia guaranteeing mutual neutrality. With Wilhelm’s accession to the throne and dismissal of Bismarck, Wilhelm decided not to be encumbered by the treaty but rely instead on his frank man-to-man relationship with the tsar. What was viewed as a shrewd chess move by Wilhelm was viewed as sinister and frightening by the Russians, who promptly signed their treaty with the French. This transformed German neuroses and began the long, fretful process of creating a war strategy that would so completely eviscerate France, on the same timetable as in 1870, that the bulk of the German army could then safely redeploy to the east and defeat Russia.
It is commonplace to say that Belgium is a small country, but this is in some contexts just not true. The nature of its position made it loom large – indeed between the Channel and the Swiss border half of the entire French frontier was with Belgium. Belgian neutrality was of a strange kind. The Netherlands was a sovereign state which chose not to engage with any European alliance and its out-of-the-way geography made this possible. Switzerland was also sovereign but guaranteed its neutrality by having a massive army, in the early twentieth century some 250,000 strong and purely defensive. Belgium was sovereign but in a way heavily compromised by its neutrality being imposed from outside by the Great Powers through what would in 1914 become known as the ‘scrap of paper’. As with earlier versions of Belgium, its neutrality suited a number of countries as it meant at least one area of the map was not subject to endless fantasies by moustachioed and booted officers: for France it meant security in the north, for Britain a guaranteed friendly coast and for the Dutch it helped ensure their own neutrality.
The Prussia that signed the ‘scrap’ back in 1839 had been a purely defensive country in the west – one of the policemen designed to box in France. In 1870 the Battle of Sedan happened because Belgium was neutral and the French troops had nowhere to go – the Prussians crushed them against a legal abstraction. As the decades went by the phantom of Sedan hag-rid the Germans and the cult of von Moltke, Roon and others made these generals into the gods of an earlier and better time. Rapid technological change also made the tactics of 1870 ever less feasible, and their replacement foggy. Officers grew old, retired and died enacting secret war games for the defeat of France. The map of France and Germany’s border areas became what must be the most intensely studied piece of land in European history, with every wood, defile, plain, bridge and height scribbled over, with both sides going on absurd mufti-clad walking holidays on enemy territory – bits of the Vosges and Ardennes must have been simply clogged with rival gangs of trekkers with hair en brosse, a clipped, ramrod-spined manner and poorly fitting civilian clothes. To say ‘enemy’ though would be wrong as it was a hostility which remained theoretical. Alfred von Schlieffen went from young commander in 1870 to Chief of the Imperial Staff, a post he held for fifteen years, before expiring in 1913 shortly before his eightieth birthday without fighting anybody for most of his life. It was Schlieffen and those around him who came to the fatal conclusion that a war with France could only be achieved through taking a route through Belgium.
This all matters so much because it was these plans for the broad strip of land from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border that would destroy Europe and initiate a period which could only be compared to the horrors of the Thirty Years War. The French commitment to Plan XVII to invade Alsace-Lorraine from bases stretching from Verdun to Belfort and the German commitment to what became known as the Schlieffen Plan (although it was much fiddled with, creating a further area of unresolvable controversy) would between them result in some 330,000 French casualties in the war’s opening weeks and about the same German. This was already uncontrollably more than in the entire Franco-Prussian War and with the other key difference that not only did both plans fail, but they were only one element in a war which, partly triggered by the invasion of Belgium, rapidly encompassed much of the world. Plan XVII never got anywhere beyond a brief occupation of Mulhouse and a glimpse of the Rhine, and the Schlieffen Plan turned into a hubristic disaster as Joseph Joffre, the French commander-in-chief, abandoned the Plan just in time and actually manoeuvred in the way his predecessors in 1870 had so painfully failed to. Neither side won and both now stared at catastrophe as, once the German retreat from the Marne had ended, a line of trenches formed from the Belgian coast to Switzerland, much of it through the core of Lotharingia.
The Battle of the Frontiers
For centuries Britain’s one obsessive concern was with the security of the far side of the Channel. A long way behind this came the security of Ireland, and after that everything was optional as vast expanses of empty sea and a handful of countries with tiny, shivering populations to the north made the foreign-policy issues easy. At some point in each century expeditionary forces were sent to fight the Spanish or the French or the Dutch. In the later nineteenth century, Dutch and Belgian neutrality were invaluable, allowing Britain to focus on its continuing, entangled enmity with France. Once, when walking round the Isle of Portland on the English south coast (pushed into doing so by the descriptions of its stone quarries in Hardy’s The Well-Beloved), I came across a huge hole in the ground that turned out to have been the site of a Victorian super-gun, which had used a mathematical grid to aim at any quadrant on the approaches to the Portland anchorage and blow up whatever was there. The area around Portland is dotted with sea-forts and strange lumps left from old military buildings, each put up at huge expense following yet another war scare with France. These non-wars have always fascinated me, with their strange hybrid sail-and-steam warships and colonial standoffs. In a way it is only through a strong historical sense of non-war that war makes sense. Franco-British rivalry in the Sudan (or indeed Russo-British rivalry in Central Asia) could have created famous, history-changing cataclysms – but did not.
The Entente Cordiale between Britain and France in 1904 ended this long and expensive antagonism and meant that the Channel was no longer an active front. Portland’s guns were promptly dismantled for use elsewhere. The Entente was a miracle cure for France, which now ended the western isolation that had dogged it since 1871. Oddly much of the agreement was about often extraordinarily petty colonial disputes – a swap of the tiny British-owned Los Islands off the coast of Guinea in return for the removal of residual French rights in barely inhabited parts of Newfoundland. Perhaps most significant was the agreement to leave Siam alone, allowing it to remain independent. These issues were symbols: from now on France and Britain would stand together. As with all such understandings, they were defensive, in as much as Germany would be unlikely to attack such a behemoth; and offensive, in as much as France now felt that with British support (and also Russian support – a longer-standing agreement) the possibility of a war of revenge with Germany came into realistic view.
The entente worked well for ten years but came under ever greater pressure from the gung-ho military attitudes of both the French and German armies and the British and German navies. The all
iance system was attractive as it made the stakes extremely high and therefore, it was assumed, no area of disagreement could be sufficiently important in itself to unleash what everyone understood would be a cataclysm. Various crises, in North Africa and the Balkans, were managed reasonably well, but each time tempers were shorter and there was more of a sense of mutual humiliation. The assassination of the Habsburg heir, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo initially seemed just another of these bad-news items but, scattered across Europe, a mixed bag of politicians and generals drifted into a reckless fatalism which now led to truly terrible decisions.
The war need only have involved Serbia and Austria-Hungary. When Russia made it clear it would protect Serbia other states were dragged in that were otherwise completely indifferent to Serbia. In each case treaty obligations seemed at the time unbreakable, and yet the cost of breaking them would have, in retrospect, been tiny. So Germany supported Austria-Hungary, France supported Russia and Britain supported France. The only intelligent actor was Italy, where it was correctly seen that no gain could be involved and the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary was cheerfully betrayed.
It is striking how, compared to now, technology then really was revolutionary and very hard to get a grip on. When the basset-hound-faced von Schlieffen stood down as Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1906 the first powered flight had happened only two years before and was of no practical interest. The execution of his endlessly fiddled with final version of his plan would be brought low by many things, but at a key moment a single small French spotter-plane buzzed overhead, its pilot noticing the derangement between the relentlessly marching German 1st and 2nd Armies – the famous ‘gap’ – and the last shred of Schlieffen’s vision collapsed. Louis XIV’s wish to be able to see his country from above had at last come true. As a gigantic re-run of the Franco-Prussian War, the opening moves in 1914 seemed oblivious to the implications of the many chilling upgrades the world had received since 1870. If it had been possible to build the Panama Canal and London Underground, or manufacture the rails for the Trans-Siberian Railway, what would it mean if those same technologies were turned to military use? Or if enjoyable new telephone technology could also be used to move troops around, would the very idea of the large ‘surprise’ attack become impossible?
Of all the countries involved in 1914, Britain was most reluctant as it had nothing to gain. As in 1939, this meant disastrously bad signalling, with the Germans confident in both cases that Britain would stay neutral. The Germans added to this belief because they had no means by which they could defeat Britain, so they were eager to read British dithering as genuine backing out. It will always be unclear what might have happened if the Germans had not invaded Belgium, but this is by most definitions irrelevant as the Germans never seriously considered any other scheme. But for Britain the idea of the Belgian and French coast under German rule, with the naval bases that could be developed there over, say, the following twenty-year period, was an intolerable problem. I have always assumed that it was the ‘Berlin genes’ of those Germans involved that fatally blinded them to the historical trap they were marching into: the Prussian emphasis on battlefields further east, with no military knowledge (except for a few weeks around Waterloo) or care for the Low Countries and their intricacies, but this is unprovable. In any event, Britain had gone to great trouble to help create Belgium and it was crucial to defend it. So completely by accident two alliance groups fought each other in alignments that made it almost impossible for either side to win. Germany never had any rational plan for invading Britain, and the Allies, as it would prove after four years of fighting, had no plan for invading Germany either. Unrealized by almost everyone (except such eccentrics as Lenin, safely tucked away in his Zürich coffee house) each passing week would not only kill unimaginable numbers of people but it would also grind to pieces Europe’s entire culture.
I must have read dozens of accounts of the opening weeks of the war, some repeatedly, and they have the force of religious texts: each reading makes even the greatest fiction vapid. The entire hubristic idea behind the German plan was effectively mad – a technical concept which required France to be beaten in six weeks so that the army could then move east to defeat Russia, and without enjoying any serious margin over French manpower. In any event that margin dissolved just marching through Belgium. Much of the German outrage at continuing Belgian resistance came from its being at odds with the plan, which went wrong immediately with the failure to destroy on time the Liège forts. The anger at ‘betrayal’ by Britain also stemmed from its not being a country featured in their crazily over-elaborate, endlessly footnoted and crossed-out invasion plan.
As the war’s opening stages were played out across the entire landscape of Belgium and France, in countless towns, roads, fields and woods, there are few places where it is possible now to get a sense of what happened. One that keeps its terrible sense of drama is the Belgian town of Dinant. Backed by its great cliff and controlling a key bridge on the Meuse, a number of generals found themselves pointing to its dot on the map. As the Germans marched towards France, Dinant was one of the few places where a coherent defence could be mounted – with the stakes very high if the Germans could pour over its bridge. In confused, brutal fighting, French troops raced to reinforce the Belgians on the heights above the town, not knowing that most of the entire German army was heading their way. Dinant fell to the Germans but the fighting was confused and – braced by stories of civilian snipers from the Franco-Prussian War – the Germans came to believe that the inhabitants had been firing on them: 674 people were rounded up and shot. The town, already devastated, was then systematically wrecked, with 1,100 buildings destroyed. These horrors – allied to other events such as shootings in Louvain and the burning of the great library there – indelibly marked Germany, within days, as being an amoral, militaristic, marauding power. Allied propaganda enraged Germany – in posters and speeches the Germans pointed out that in the previous two centuries Prussia had fought thirteen wars, France thirty-five and Britain forty-nine; that since 1871 Germany had barely used its army whereas Britain had been killing twenty-six thousand Boer women and children in concentration camps. But it was too late. The German army in the west imposed draconian discipline on its troops and the anti-civilian violence almost disappeared, but for both Allied and much neutral opinion Germany now became a different kind of enemy, outside the pale of civilization.
Dinant is so shocking to visit because it is easy to see its geographical importance, the vulnerability of those living there and how strangely new the buildings all look for such an ancient place. The bridge is a most chilling place. On different parts of the front, particularly the Ardennes, the French started digging trenches a couple of days after the fighting stopped in Dinant – and this became the only rational way to reduce casualties. In Dinant the fighting was in the open and the absolute vulnerability of the human body to the complicated mixes of metal and chemical filling the air meant that for both sides the sort of courage needed to run forward over the bridge was near super-human. The French troops who at one point rushed the bridge were massacred. One who was only wounded while all those around him died was the young Charles de Gaulle. During the war’s opening months, the future of the twentieth century was in fact scattered everywhere: de Gaulle in Dinant, Churchill in Antwerp, Röhm in Lorraine, Göring in Alsace and Hitler outside Ypres.
As the Germans headed south their campaign fell to pieces. On 23 August 24.5 German divisions were bearing down on 17.5 Allied ones. By 6 September, as the French initiated the Battle of the Marne, the Allies had 41 divisions. Italy’s declaration of neutrality freed up 6 new French divisions, 2 more arrived from North Africa and a further British division was shipped into Zeebrugge and Ostend – while the German army (its horses needing two million pounds of fodder a day, its boots falling to pieces) began to experience a nervous breakdown. Oddly none of this was visible to the generals of the Imperial High Command who, as Joffre beg
an to move, were under the impression they had already won. How many of them were already beginning to think about which artists to commission for super ‘warlord’ oil-paintings in the manner of those done for the heroes of 1870? By 6 September a huge part of the front had already ‘frozen’, from Switzerland to Verdun and beyond. The French had already sustained 320,000 casualties; the Germans only a few less; much of the small British force was dead – these were levels which already simply had no meaning or precedent. They made the rulers of each country absolutely committed to using every industrial and human means to prevail and therefore justify through further catastrophes the catastrophe that had just happened.
In all the near-meaningless big statistics there are specific moments which make things a lot harsher and more graspable. In the exemplary new war museum in Ypres there are a number of tall, grey, closed-off areas which look deliberately boring so that children do not enter them. Inside one is an account of events in Vottem, a village north of Liège. A brief flurry of fighting before the front moved south left the villagers with wounded Belgian and German troops to care for, who they put in separate rooms. There were also a number of dead (eleven German and twenty-two Belgian). The villagers were terrified of reprisals and decided that before burying the dead they would photograph each one so that there was an undisputable record of who had been killed fighting. Some of these pictures are on display. Each corpse, wearing his uniform, is put on the same chair with its head held upright by someone seizing its hair. I feel that a fair split can be made: how I saw the world before going into the display and how I saw it after coming out. I am not sure anybody should be allowed to see these pictures and I cannot bring myself to describe them. The villagers were right – the pictures convinced the Germans when they came back that Vottem’s civilians had reacted properly and had remained neutral. But what has been left behind in these photos is something that lives in a different world from the official, carefully controlled media of 1914, and the little space they inhabit in the museum is itself a sort of uniquely powerful commemorative chapel to a Europe that had now gone completely wrong.
