A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  It was a good reason to delay the mobilization, said Tirpitz, at least until they knew what it was all about.

  Rubbish, said Moltke and Falkenhayn, and they departed. They were off to oversee the mobilization.

  The message from London proved to be not just important but astonishing. Lichnowsky reported that the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had just telephoned him with a momentous question. Grey wanted to know, the ambassador said, “if I thought I could assure him that in case France should remain neutral in a Russo-German war, we would not attack the French.” The question had come just in advance of a meeting of the British cabinet, and Lichnowsky had assured Grey “that I could take responsibility for such a guaranty, and he is to use this assurance at today’s cabinet session.”

  The kaiser, when he had absorbed this, was almost beside himself with joy. So was Bethmann: it seemed almost too good to be true. It placed at Germany’s feet an historic diplomatic victory. The Germans were now free to bring Russia to heel virtually without risk and to restore Austria-Hungary’s position among the powers.

  Moltke and Falkenhayn were intercepted and summoned back to the palace. The message from London was read to them. Then the kaiser gave new orders to Moltke:

  “We shall simply march the whole army east!”

  These words came as a blow to Moltke. He was the nephew and namesake of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, one of the greatest figures in German military history. The elder Moltke had led the Prussian army to victory over Austria in 1866, thereby establishing Prussia as the leader of the German states. He had then, in 1870, led the armies of Prussia and the German states allied with it in the defeat of France. His nephew had always enjoyed a special place in the army simply because of his name. It was almost certainly his name, in fact, that had propelled him to the top of the general staff. He was a stolid, insecure man, gloomy and filled with fear of the future, convinced that Germany’s enemies were growing stronger so rapidly that within not many more years the empire’s position would be hopeless. This fear had caused him to toy with the idea of preventive war (an idea that Bismarck had ridiculed as “committing suicide out of fear of death”), though he had never actually advocated or prepared for such a war. He was sixty-seven years old in 1914, with heavy jowls and too much flesh on what had once been his impressively martial frame, a weary man recovering from a bronchial infection, devoid of the slightest trace of charisma. No one had ever mistaken him for a military genius.

  All the same he was a competent, conscientious, experienced soldier. And now he could scarcely believe what the kaiser was telling him. Stop this enormous army? Smash all the clockwork plans for transporting it and feeding it and making certain that at every point it would have what it needed to fight? Turn it around? March it east? Call off the great wheeling movement to the west that was the whole and only point of German mobilization and almost certainly Germany’s sole hope of victory?

  Moltke collected his wits and began to speak. “I assured his Majesty,” he would write later, “that this wasn’t possible. The deployment of an army of a million men was not a matter of improvisation. It was the product of a whole year’s work—of timetables that once worked out could not be changed. If his Majesty insisted on leading the whole army eastwards, he would not have an army ready to strike, he would have a confused mass of disorderly armed men without commissariat.” Not only would his army be a confused and disorderly mass of troops, he added, but once facing eastward it would have at its back sixty-two French army divisions ready for action and equipped with their own carefully developed plans for the conquest of Germany. How could Britain, how could anyone, guarantee that France would not seize such an opportunity?

  The kaiser, his withered left arm tight against his side as usual, the waxed points of his great hornlike mustache reaching upward almost to his eyes, answered Moltke in the most wounding way possible.

  “Your uncle,” he said, “would have given me a different answer.”

  “This pained me a good deal,” Moltke would recall, “for I have never pretended to be the equal of the great Field Marshal.” He tried to explain that once the mobilization plan had been executed, it would become possible to start moving troops to the east, adding that he could not accept responsibility for the military consequences of halting its execution. Bethmann interrupted in a way that Moltke could not have welcomed, saying that he could not accept political responsibility for a failure to respond positively to Britain’s remarkable offer. Finally and with difficulty, a compromise was worked out. Falkenhayn took Moltke into a side room and quietly argued that some slowing of the mobilization process had to be possible. The invasion force could be stopped at least briefly at the Luxembourg border, surely. Moltke gave in. This could work for a while—for hours, though not for days.

  Before the slowdown could create serious problems, causing troops and trains that were supposed to be advancing to back up on one another and wreck all the timetables, Berlin learned that what is usually true of things that seem too good to be true applied in this case: the message from London was the result of a tangle of misunderstandings. The origins of these misunderstandings remain hard to unravel even today. It seems certain that Grey, in raising the question of possible French and British neutrality, had not regarded himself as offering anything like a formal proposal. But he like everyone else had been willing to clutch at straws by this point, and apparently he had tossed out an idle thought to see what kind of response it might draw. Perhaps, enmeshed as he was in the struggle going on within the British government and exhausted by long days and nights of searching for a resolution to the continental crisis, he had been less than clear in what he said. Certainly it could never have occurred to him that his idea would be seized by the Germans as an opportunity to delay fighting with France in order to crush Russia first; what he probably had in mind, rather, was an arrangement in which Germany would stand on the defensive on both fronts while the Austro-Russian dispute was worked out.

  Perhaps Lichnowsky, who throughout the crisis had displayed exceptional understanding of its dangers and exceptional courage in telling his government truths that it did not want to hear, had been too eager to believe that Grey was telling him what he most wanted to hear. As early as 1912, even before taking up his post in London, he had told the kaiser that “it is understandable that each increase in Serbian power and her expansion towards the sea is regarded with alarm by the Austrian statesmen; but it would be incomprehensible if we should run even the faintest risk of becoming involved in a war for such a cause.” His feelings on the matter were even stronger in 1914, and he never hesitated to say so.

  For a few blissful hours an exultant Kaiser Wilhelm was able to occupy himself with grandiose new schemes. The German foreign ministry cabled Lichnowsky that Britain would be required to guarantee French neutrality, that it had until seven P.M. on Monday to make the necessary arrangements, and that until then Germany would refrain from attacking. Finally, all such fantasies were brought crashing down by another message from London. Lichnowsky reported that Grey, after meeting with the cabinet, had told him that a German violation of Belgian neutrality “would make it difficult for the Government here to adopt an attitude of friendly neutrality.” Germany’s failure to promise that it would not enter Belgium, Grey had added, “has caused an unfavorable impression.” He had again raised the question of whether it might be possible for France and Germany “to remain facing each other under arms, without attacking each other, in the event of a Russian war,” but there was no further suggestion that Britain was promising neutrality in return.

  German Ambassador Lichnowsky making his last call on the British Foreign Office

  Grey was offering, in a word, nothing. Obliquely but clearly enough, he was indicating that Britain would likely join with France in case of war—especially a war that took German troops into Belgium. The kaiser, after venting his rage about the deceitful English (his feelings about Britain had always been a mess of
admiration, envy, and resentment), put everything back on track. Moltke was told that the mobilization could go forward as originally intended. Later, in making his marginal comments on Lichnowsky’s last message, the kaiser gave particular attention to Grey’s mention of an “unfavorable impression” having been created in London. “My impression,” he wrote, “is that Mr. Grey is a false dog who is afraid of his own meanness and false policy, but who will not come out in the open against us, preferring to let himself be forced by us to do it.” His childish language aside, the kaiser did have a point.

  Shortly after seven P.M. in St. Petersburg, Germany’s Ambassador Pourtalès was admitted to the office of Foreign Minister Sazonov. The two men were friends, though throughout July their meetings had sometimes been volcanic. Pourtalès had been in St. Petersburg for seven years and had developed an affection for Russia. Like diplomats and politicians in all the capital cities, he had had almost no sleep in days. He was an old man, already preparing for retirement when the crisis began, and by Saturday he was approaching collapse. Quietly, he asked Sazonov if Russia was prepared to answer the double ultimatum.

  Sazonov, exhausted himself, overwrought, and a volatile personality under the best of circumstances, had just come from a meeting at which he had been trying to assure the British ambassador that Russia’s mobilization did not necessarily mean war. He answered Pourtalès by echoing what the tsar had earlier told the kaiser: although it was not possible to stop mobilization, Russia wanted to continue negotiations. Russia remained hopeful of avoiding war.

  Pourtalès took from his pocket a copy of Germany’s ultimatum, read it aloud, and added that the consequences of a negative reply would be grave.

  Sazonov repeated his first answer.

  Pourtalès too repeated himself: the consequences would be grave.

  “I have no other reply to give you,” said Sazonov.

  Pourtalès took out more papers. “In that case, sir, I am instructed by my government to hand you this note.” In his hands he held two messages, both of them declarations of war. One was for use if Russia gave no answer to the ultimatum, the other a reply to a negative answer. In his distress and confusion he pressed both on Sazonov and burst into tears.

  Or so Sazonov wrote years later in his memoirs. Pourtalès’s recollection was that Sazonov wept first. Whatever the sequence, apparently both men cried. They embraced, then pulled apart and began to exchange accusations.

  “This was a criminal act of yours,” Sazonov said. “The curses of the nations will be upon you.”

  “We were defending our honor.”

  “Your honor was not involved.”

  Finally they parted forever, Sazonov helping the distraught Pourtalès to the door.

  Bound for glory: the troops of imperial Germany, adorned with the pickelhaube headgear that will soon be replaced with more practical steel helmets, marching off to start the war.

  Chapter 7

  The Iron Dice Roll

  “If the iron dice roll, may God help us.”

  CHANCELLOR THEOBOLD VON BETHMANN HOLLWEG

  Before every commander of the armies that went to war in August 1914 there lay the possibility of becoming a hero, a giant, a deliverer of his people. Likewise there lay before every one of them the very real possibility of everlasting disgrace.

  This was nowhere more true than in the case of Helmuth von Moltke, who as the war began was sixty-six years old, in questionable health, and approaching the ninth anniversary of his appointment as head of the German high command. His long service as chief meant that he was responsible not only for winning the war but for the plans—the inconceivably intricate plans, including among much else the timetables of the eleven thousand trains that would have to be moved to complete German mobilization—according to which the war was to be prosecuted. All of it was on his shoulders. And Moltke went to war without a trace of Napoleonic zest. Throughout most of the July crisis he had been a voice for restraint. Though Russia’s mobilization turned him into a strident advocate of military action, even then he was motivated not by any hunger for conquest or expectation of victory but by fear of a kind that was far from uncommon in the upper reaches of the German civil and military administration. This fear rose out of the belief, the conviction, that Germany was encircled by enemies who were growing stronger at an alarming rate, and that if the showdown were delayed just a few years more there might be no possibility of victory, even of survival. Far from looking forward to a quick and easy victory, Moltke said that if war came it would be “a long weary struggle with a country that will not acknowledge defeat until the whole strength of its people is broken, a war that even if we should be the victors will push our own people, too, to the limits of exhaustion.”

  Helmuth von Moltke “Too reflective, too scrupulous, and too conscientious.”

  This prognosis was consistent with Moltke’s innate pessimism; he was so notorious for his gloomy outlook that the kaiser had long made a joke of it. His pessimism even extended, and always had, to his own abilities; in 1905, when it was beginning to appear that he would be promoted to head of the general staff over capable and more experienced rivals, Moltke had confided to the German chancellor of the time that he regarded himself as “too reflective, too scrupulous, and, if you like, too conscientious for such a post.” He said he did not possess “the capacity for risking all on a single throw” that marked great commanders. About that he appears to have been right; he was less a man of action than an intellectual and aesthete, more cultivated than Prussian generals were expected to be. “Art is the only thing I live for,” he once commented, revealing just how remote his values were from those of the Junkers whose sons made up Germany’s military elite. But he was also right about what lay ahead. The accuracy of his dark prophecy reflected not only his disposition but his acumen, his grasp of the realities of twentieth-century warfare.

  It is not only ironic but mystifying, in light of what he foresaw, that Moltke had committed himself and his nation to a strategy focused exclusively on the achievement of a lightning-fast victory over France. This strategy was embedded in the deeply secret Schlieffen Plan, originally the work of Field Marshal Count Alfred von Schlieffen, Moltke’s predecessor as chief of the general staff. He had developed it before his retirement in 1905 in response to the formation of the Franco-Russian Entente and the resulting likelihood that, if war came, Germany was going to find itself fighting on two fronts. He based it on simple assumptions: that even with Austria-Hungary on its side Germany could not expect to win a protracted war against both France and Russia; that Russia would be unable to mobilize rapidly; and that the immense size of the Russian empire meant that any invader looking for a quick and decisive victory was likely to be as disappointed as Napoleon had been after capturing Moscow in 1812. Out of these assumptions rose the conclusion that Germany had to crush France before Russia became capable of mounting an offensive. It could then shift its forces to the east and crush Russia in its turn.

  Moltke had adopted the plan upon succeeding Schlieffen, and in the years that followed he changed it substantially. As a result of his changes, and ultimately as a result of the failure of the altered plan to deliver Paris into German hands within the forty days that Schlieffen had set as his deadline, Moltke’s assigned place in history has generally been among the fools and weaklings. Schlieffen, by contrast, has been enshrined as a strategist of much brilliance, the creator of a key to glory that Moltke proved incapable of using. If such judgments are not flagrantly unfair, they are at a minimum arguable. It would be absurd to think that Moltke should have regarded the plan he received from Schlieffen as too sacred to be altered as circumstances changed. Schlieffen had handed his ideas over to Moltke at a point when Russia was weaker than it had been in generations. It had just lost its war with Japan and was faced with a popular uprising that had shaken the Romanov regime. Schlieffen had good reason to assume that Russia might be unable to put an effective army into the field at all, never mind speedily.<
br />
  By 1914 the situation had changed. For five years the Russian government had been spending a third of its revenues on its army and navy. The so-called Grand Program, initiated in 1913, provided for the addition of 585,000 men to the tsar’s armies annually, with each recruit to remain on active duty for at least three years. By 1914, 1.4 million Russian troops were in uniform, with several million more reservists available in case of mobilization—enough to form as many as 150 divisions. Russia had also made great strides in industrializing, French capital was financing a radical improvement of the Russian rail system in ways directly threatening to Germany, and France itself was growing both in strength and in confidence. Moltke would have had to be a fool not to fear that the Russians might be capable of fighting their way to Berlin before the Germans reached Paris.

  Moltke’s uncle and namesake, the architect of Germany’s victories over Austria and France almost half a century earlier, had seen things very differently from Schlieffen. In his last years he came to believe that in a two-front war Germany should stand on the defensive in the west, attack in the east just enough to drive the Russians out of Poland, and then allow its enemies to wreck their armies by hurling them against walls of fire and steel. He believed that such a war would end not in victory but in a negotiated peace with exhausted but undefeated foes—and that that was all Germany should hope for. “We should exploit in the West the great advantages which the Rhine and our powerful fortifications offer to the defensive,” he had said as early as 1879, “and should apply all the fighting forces which are not absolutely indispensable for an imposing offensive against the east.” This remained German doctrine until Schlieffen, an austere and solitary man with few interests outside military history and strategy, became head of the army and gradually set Moltke’s thinking aside.