In August 1914, Moltke had a formidable force at his disposal: 880,000 active soldiers, including the regular army of 794,310 men, the Imperial Navy of 79,000, and the colonial forces of 7,000. With the addition of the Landwehr I (reserves aged twenty-eight to thirty-three) and the Landwehr II (aged thirty-three to thirty-nine), the total ballooned to 2.147 million men organized into eighty-seven and a half infantry divisions and fifty-five cavalry brigades. Almost one million Ersatz reserves—men who had escaped the draft and at age twenty committed to twelve years of service—stood as a last manpower reservoir.54 Seventy infantry divisions were to march west at the outbreak of war; facing them would likely be ninety-two enemy divisions.
German forces in the west in 1914 were organized into seven field armies, each consisting of about four army corps. There were as yet no “army groups.” A corps resembled a small village armed and on the move. Each peacetime corps, consisting of roughly twenty thousand men, upon mobilization was brought up to a wartime cohort of fifteen hundred officers and forty thousand noncommissioned officers and men, fourteen thousand horses and twenty-four hundred ammunition and supply wagons for its twenty-five battalions; fully mobilized, it covered fifty kilometers of road. A corps consumed about 130 tons of food and fodder per day. Its artillery consisted of twenty-four field batteries, each of six 135mm guns, and of four heavy artillery batteries, each of four guns. Of special note was a battalion of sixteen superb 150mm howitzers. Each corps had eight regiments of cavalry. Each had a squadron of six mainly Gotha and Albatros biplanes for reconnaissance, as did each corps headquarters. The aircraft had a flight endurance of two to three hours, mounted two 25cm cameras for surveillance, and carried a single Mauser pistol as “armament.” Bomb capacity was restricted to several five-and ten-kilogram missiles that the pilot could “freely throw” over the side of the craft.55
In terms of organization, the army was arranged by twos: two divisions to a corps, two brigades to a division, and two regiments to a brigade. The heart of the German army was its combat division.56 It consisted of four regiments, each of 3,000 soldiers; each regiment contained three battalions of 1,000; and each battalion, four companies of 250. The divisional commander had at his disposal an artillery brigade of seventy-two guns, fifty-four of which were flat-trajectory 77mm pieces. Moltke had added to each infantry division an additional company with six 1908 Maxim water-cooled machine guns as well as a battalion of eighteen 105mm howitzers.
Infantry remained the “queen of battle.” The German Field Regulations of May 1906 identified it as “the primary weapon … its fire will batter the enemy. It alone breaks his last resistance. It carries the brunt of combat and makes the greatest sacrifices.” Above all, “infantry must nurture its intrinsic drive to attack aggressively. Its actions must be dominated by one thought: Forward against the enemy, cost what it may!”57 Each soldier was provided with a sturdy 7.9mm bolt-action Mauser Rifle 98, a bayonet, a knapsack of twenty-three kilograms, an entrenching tool, a haversack, a mess kit, six ammunition pouches, and a small metal disk with his name on it. While infantry still wore the leather spiked helmet (Pickelhaube), its colorful tunics had yielded to standard field gray, a color that blended well with smoke, mud, and autumn foliage. Each soldier carried a leather greatcoat looped outside his backpack; each marched in stiff, nailed boots (Blücher). While the Field Regulations of 1909 raised the possibility that infantry advance in columns of thin lines and that it adopt “swarming” skirmish tactics, infantry, in fact, continued to be drilled to advance in thick marching columns. Charles Repington, military correspondent for The Times of London, in October 1911 concluded from German maneuvers: “No other modern army displays such profound contempt for the effect of modern fire.”58
Cavalry had been greatly reduced since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Whereas the Elder Moltke’s army of 462,000 soldiers had included 56,800 “sabers,” his nephew’s army of 2 million in 1914 had but 90,000 cavalry. The Younger Moltke had done much to upgrade the firepower of the cavalry, with the result that every brigade of 680 riders had with it three batteries each of four guns as well as a company of six machine guns. Still, what one German scholar called a “true chivalrous mounted mentality” reigned among the cavalry: “lance against lance, saber against saber.”59 Its role remained reconnaissance and shock. In early August 1914, the slick stone pavements of Belgian towns and villages caused many a cavalry charge to come to grief, with riders at times skewering one another on their steel-tube lances.60
There was one glaring area of neglect: electronic communications. Year after year, Schlieffen and Moltke had been content to conduct annual maneuvers and staff rides by each night handing out detailed plans and directives for the next day’s assignments. But would this suffice for the modern, lethal battlefield?61 By 1914, plans had been finalized to provide each army corps with a company and its headquarters with a battalion of telephone specialists as well as a company of wireless operators. Thus, the number of telephone companies had increased from twenty in 1912 to forty by the following year. The outbreak of war in August 1914, however, found these units still being created. The army’s stock of twenty-one thousand carrier pigeons was to offset this deficit.
To Moltke’s credit, he brilliantly supervised the mobilization of Germany’s armed forces in 1914. For two decades, the General Staff’s best and brightest had labored day and night to shave minutes off the Military Travel Plan, the critical stage five of mobilization. They sprang into action after noon on 31 July, when Wilhelm II declared a “threatening state of danger of war”—which effectively amounted to a declaration of war—to exist.62 Gerhard Tappen, chief of operations, unlocked the great steel safe and took out the most recent “Deployment Plan 1914/15.” “It was a peculiar feeling,” he noted in his diary.63 Thereupon, the Military Telegraph Section instructed two hundred thousand telegraph employees and one hundred thousand telephone operators at Berlin’s major post offices to send out news of the state of Kriegsgefahr to the 106 infantry brigades scattered throughout the Reich. The Railroad Section and its twenty-three directorates outside the capital began to requisition thirty thousand locomotives as well as sixty-five thousand passenger and eight hundred thousand freight cars needed to assemble twenty-five active corps. Mobilization formally began on 2 August.
Germany’s declaration of war (under Article 68 of the Constitution of 1871) against Russia on 1 August and against France two days later put the mobilization process into high gear. In 312 hours, roughly eleven thousand trains shuttled 119,754 officers, 2.1 million men, and six hundred thousand horses to the various marshaling areas under stage seven (“attack march”) of the Military Travel Plan. The 1.6 million soldiers of the west army—950 infantry battalions and 498 cavalry squadrons—rolled across the Rhine River bridges at the rate of 560 trains, each of fifty-four cars, per day at an average speed of thirty kilometers per hour. The Hohenzollern Bridge at Cologne alone witnessed 2,150 trains thundering over it in ten-minute intervals between 2 and 8 August.64 The Germans, Evelyn Princess Blücher noted in Berlin, “take to war as a duck takes to water.”65 There was no disorder and no opposition to mobilization, with the result that Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg shelved prewar plans to arrest “unpatriotic” Socialists. In fact, on 3 August, the Social Democratic Party caucus voted 78 to 14 to grant war credits; the next day, it closed ranks and unanimously approved 2.27 billion Reichsmark for the first thirty days of mobilization, followed by an immediate supplementary grant of 5 billion.66
Mobilization was executed equally flawlessly in Germany’s second largest federal state, the Kingdom of Bavaria. News of the “threatening state of danger of war” arrived by telegram from Berlin at 2 PM on 31 July, and by next morning Munich’s post offices sent out forty-seven thousand telegrams to district commands, barracks, and depots. In the Bavarian lands east of the Rhine River the General Staff mobilized three thousand trains; in the Bavarian Palatinate, twenty-five hundred. In eight to twelve days, the active army (Feld
heer) of 6,699 officers, 269,000 noncommissioned officers and ranks, 222 heavy artillery pieces, and 76,000 thousand horses, as well as the reserve army (Besatzungsheer) of 2,671 officers, 136,834 noncommissioned officers and ranks, 104 heavy artillery guns, and 9,000 horses, were mobilized and pointed for the front in Lorraine.67
Similarly smooth mobilizations also took place in the other federal states. Archduke Friedrich II of Baden’s forces were close to the French border, and hence there was no need for extensive railway transport.68 Baden XIV Army Corps under Ernst von Hoiningen-Huene consisted of thirty battalions of infantry, eight squadrons of cavalry, and twenty-four batteries of field artillery. Its task was to guard the east bank of the Rhine between Breisach and Lörrach, and then to march toward Thann, at the base of the Vosges Mountains.69 Richard von Schubert’s XIV Reserve Corps, a hodgepodge of twelve infantry battalions and Prussian as well as Württemberg Landwehr units, assembled farther north between Lahr and Breisach with orders to proceed to Neuenburg and Mulhouse. All units were issued the new field-gray uniforms. Grateful villagers, noted Sergeant Otto Breinlinger, 10th Company, 111th Reserve Infantry Regiment, stood in awe and showered the men with “bread, coffee, wine, lemonade, apples, raspberry juice, pears & cigars.”70 On 1 August, Hoiningen-Huene had rallied his men with a bristling Order of the Day: “Our enemies have forced the sword into our hands—forced to use it, we will, even should the waves of the Rhine turn red.”71 Around midnight on 7–8 August, Baden’s soldiers marched off to war in rain and storm. They came under the command of Prussian general Josias von Heeringen, whose Seventh Army was responsible for securing the extreme left wing of the German line.
King Friedrich August III of Saxony entrusted Third Army to Max von Hausen, at age sixty-eight war minister and peacetime commander of XII Army Corps in Dresden. Mobilization orders arrived from Berlin in the afternoon of 1 August. Hausen spent the next week assembling Third Army: 101 active and reserve infantry battalions, 30 squadrons of cavalry, and 99 artillery batteries. Third Army entrained at Dresden-Neustadt late in the evening of 7 August, en route to the Eiffel Mountains near the French border.72 It was assigned to the central front, its right wing attached to Second Army and its left wing to Fourth Army. Hausen’s orders were to advance against the line of the Meuse (Maas) River between Namur and Givet.
Finally, the childless King Wilhelm II of Württemberg turned XIII Army Corps over to Max von Fabeck as part of Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia’s Fifth Army at Thionville. Then, to assuage royal sensibilities, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave Duke Albrecht, head of the Catholic branch of the House of Württemberg, command of Fourth Army. Its 123 infantry battalions—an amalgam of German federal units—were the heart of the central front, facing the formidable Ardennes Forest as far down as Luxembourg.73 In historian Sewell Tyng’s apt description, Fourth Army was the “hub of the wheel,” of which Hausen’s Third Army and Karl von Bülow’s Second Army were the “spoke,” and Alexander von Kluck’s First Army the “outer rim.”74 Albrecht’s corps were in position by 12 August, reserve corps two days later, and Ersatz draft divisions by 18 August.
Moltke assembled his forces according to the Revised Deployment Plan.75 In the south, Heeringen’s Seventh Army (125,000 men) took up position east of the Rhine from Strasbourg (Straßburg) down to the Swiss border; just north of him, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria’s Sixth Army (220,000) advanced between Saargemünd and Saarburg. The two armies were to “fix” French forces in the Reichsland and to “prevent their transportation to the French left wing.” The giant Schwenkungsflügel (pivot wing) of First to Fifth Armies was to be anchored on Thionville-Metz. The German center consisted of three armies: Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia’s Fifth Army (200,000) was to drive west between Thionville, Metz, and Saarbrücken in the direction of Florinville and Verdun; north of him, Duke Albrecht’s Fourth Army (200,000) was to march through Trier, Luxembourg, and the Ardennes Forest toward Sedan and Semois; and north of Albrecht, Hausen’s Third Army (180,000) was to head through the Ardennes Forest toward Dinant, Fumay, and Givet.
The hammer of the German advance, of course, consisted of Kluck’s First Army (320,000 men) and Bülow’s Second Army (260,000). In the early-morning hours of 3 August, Georg von der Marwitz’s II Cavalry Corps stormed the Belgian border near Gemmenich; Kluck’s and Bülow’s six hundred thousand gray-clad formations crossed the Meuse River the next day. First Army headed for Brussels and Antwerp, Second Army for Namur. Directly ahead of them lay Liège. Moltke had detailed Otto von Emmich’s X Army Corps to storm the fortress with six infantry brigades and three cavalry divisions. On its success rested Kluck’s and Bülow’s rapid advance through a twenty-kilometer-wide funnel into the heart of Belgium—and beyond.
Moltke in the spring of 1914 had undertaken a cursory evaluation of his likely counterpart. The word from the German military attaché in Paris was that Chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre was “renowned” for “his sense of responsibility, his work ethic and his common sense.” But he was also suspected to be phlegmatic, “incapable of making hard and fast decisions.” How would he hold up under the pressure of war? The final verdict, italicized for emphasis, was: “In any case, one can not assess him as a ruthless, energetic leader capable of doing whatever the situation demands.”76
FRANCE’S NATIONAL POLICY AND its military strategy were clear in 1914: to “push” its allies “into the fight” and to assure St. Petersburg of “unequivocal” support in case of war. As stated previously, Paris’s goal in 1914 “was to avoid making decisions.”77 With President Raymond Poincaré and Prime Minister René Viviani en route to St. Petersburg after 16 July and with the Senate as well as the Chamber of Deputies (which had to approve a declaration of war) in summer recess from 15 July through 4 August, it proved no great task to “avoid making decisions.”
Of course, the military stood on alert after the assassinations at Sarajevo on 28 June. How would the Russian ally react to any Austro-Hungarian action against Serbia? This was a pivotal question, for in 1914 France and Russia had the only firm military alliance in Europe. Under its terms, in the case of a German attack, France would field 1.3 million men and Russia 800,000.78 Formal staff talks held every year after 1900 reaffirmed the original pledge to wage war against Germany from the first day of its mobilization. At the last peacetime meeting in August 1913, Russia promised to mount an offensive into the “heart” of Germany by the fourteenth day of mobilization; France, to concentrate “nearly all its forces” along its northeastern frontier by the fifteenth day.79 Both General Staffs expected the brunt of a German offensive to fall in the west, with only light forces defending East Prussia.
After Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia one month after the double murders at Sarajevo France entrusted mobilizing her armies to Joseph Césaire Joffre, chief of the General Staff since July 1911. Joffre had not been the obvious choice for the post. War Minister Adolphe Messimy’s top candidate, General Joseph Galliéni, had turned down the post in part because he was close to retirement age. Galliéni had then recommended two men: Paul-Marie Pau and Joseph Joffre. But Pau was a devout Catholic and demanded upon appointment the right (reserved for the war minister) to select commanding generals. Thus, Joffre got the post by default.
Joffre was born on 12 January 1852 at Riversaltes, in the eastern Pyrenees. He came from “modest blood,” an artisan family of coopers. He graduated not from the Military College at Saint-Cyr, but rather from the École Polytechnique, and with a mediocre school record at that. He commanded an artillery battery during the siege of Paris in 1870–71 and then, as an engineer, served in Indo-China, West Africa, and Madagascar. Upon returning to France, he commanded an artillery group and then became director of Engineers and director of Support Services at the War Ministry, where he acquired an intimate appreciation for logistics and railway transportation. In 1907, he took command of 6th Infantry Division and the following year of II Army Corps at Amiens. Unlike his European counterparts, he had not mad
e a name for himself either by publishing treatises on strategy or by distinguishing himself at army maneuvers. His main claim to fame in 1911 rested on the fact that he was a competent fortifications engineer and a decorated colonial soldier.
In terms of character, to his detractors, Joffre was unimaginative and feckless, lacking grand gestures, almost featureless. He was known to be stubborn, almost to the point of stolidity and obstinacy. His baggy clothes—black tunic and red breeches—hardly inspired dash and daring. To his supporters, Joffre was known for his forthrightness, honesty, consideration for subordinates—he retained throughout his life his boyhood nickname le père Joffre, Papa Joffre—and imperturbable calm under stress. To politicians in Paris, he offered what they valued most—an utter lack of ambition and deviousness. His physical appearance—stout, white hair, with a full round face accentuated by pale blue eyes and a long white mustache—tended to efface any impression of distinction or drive. His strict daily regimen of work, rest, sleep, and meals—usually ending with a heaping serving of his favorite leg of lamb (gigot à la Bretonne)—further seemed to indicate a placid (and even dull) personality.
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