A World Undone

by G. J. Meyer

  The validity of the new strategy was, however, something less than self-evident, as Schlieffen himself acknowledged. His commentaries, which he continued to produce and share with the general staff throughout the years after his retirement, make clear that he was far from certain that it could succeed. It bet everything on an overwhelming right wing made up of seven out of every eight soldiers available for the fight with France. This massed force was to punch like a fist through three neutral countries—Holland, Belgium, and tiny Luxembourg—on its way into France. It would swing counterclockwise in a great wheeling motion, first to the west and then southward into France, overrunning whatever enemy forces confronted it, encircling and cutting off Paris, and finally swinging back to the east to take whatever remained of the French army in the rear and destroy it.

  The plan was majestic in conception and breathtakingly bold but also fraught with problems not all of which were military. From a narrowly military standpoint the invasion of the three neutral countries was sensible: it would enable the Germans to move across northern Europe’s flat and open coastal plain, avoiding the powerful fortresses that the French had constructed in the rough hill country just west of their long border with Germany. In terms of grand strategy and international politics, however, it was dangerous in the extreme. It gave no weight to the possibility that a violation of the treaties guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium and Holland might provoke Britain to intervene. If Schlieffen considered the possibility of British intervention, he obviously regarded it as an acceptable risk. Britain’s army was small (Bismarck had joked that if it ever invaded Germany, he would have it arrested). If Germany could wrap up the war in the west on Schlieffen’s timetable, the British would have little opportunity to become a factor.

  The French general staff was equally alert to the attractions of Belgium as a route into its enemy’s heartland. But it did not have the autonomy that allowed Schlieffen and then the younger Moltke to consult with no one; hard experience with two Bonapartist empires had made republican France wary of placing too much authority over strategy in the hands of the military. As late as 1913 the French Supreme War Council was exploring a possible invasion of Germany through Belgium, but it was obliged to keep the Paris government informed as it did so. By this time the French and British were well along in planning joint operations, and the French government was determined to bring the British in on its side in case of war. Therefore Paris checked with London about the War Council’s idea and was sternly warned off. Any such move, France’s friends on the British general staff said, would destroy even the possibility of support from Britain. And so the council stopped all work in that direction.

  In Germany no such course correction was, in practical terms, even possible. No German chancellor since the young Wilhelm II’s dismissal of Bismarck in 1890 had ever attempted to question, never mind challenge, the war planning of the general staff. As Bethmann Hollweg wrote in self-defense after the war, “for the civilian side to have tried to foil a thoroughly thought-out military plan described as absolutely essential would have entailed an intolerable responsibility. In the event of a subsequent failure, such a policy would have been considered its sole cause.” Bethmann’s administration was afraid to interfere with the army’s plans even when those plans entailed terrible political risks. There is no better example of how the governmental machinery created by Bismarck proved inadequate to deal with the dangers and complexities of the twentieth century, when Bismarck’s strong hand and towering intellect no longer controlled the levers of power.

  In his splendid isolation Schlieffen assumed that Germany’s enemies were intent not just on her defeat but on her destruction, and that as a result she was justified in doing things that under less harrowing circumstances would not have been thinkable. The seizure of the Dutch and Belgian roads and railways became not only desirable but imperative. Nothing less could save Germany, and anything else would increase Germany’s peril. “If we were to attack along the entire Belfort-Montmédy front [along the line of French fortresses] with blind faith in the sanctity of neutrality,” Schlieffen wrote, “we would soon be effectively enveloped on our right flank by a realistic and unscrupulous enemy advancing through southern Belgium and Luxembourg.” The “unscrupulous enemy” was, of course, France. Schlieffen’s guiding principle was that if Germany declined the benefits of violating the neutrality of its neighbors, France would happily seize them.

  If Schlieffen had few concerns about the price of invading Belgium and Holland, he had many about whether his plan was militarily feasible. The outer edge of his right wing, in sweeping toward Paris, would have to advance more than two hundred miles through enemy territory in no more than forty days, defeating whatever enemies it encountered along the way. The infantry would have to do this mainly on foot, each soldier carrying seventy or more pounds of equipment every step of the way. If the horse-drawn artillery failed to keep up, if the huge amounts of food and fodder and ammunition and replacements needed by all these hundreds of thousands of men and their scores of thousands of horses were not always near at hand, if good order was not maintained, the entire venture would collapse of its own weight under the guns of the enemy.

  Schlieffen calculated that the German army would need ninety divisions to execute his plan. (It had only about sixty in 1905.) He concluded that if the right wing did manage to reach Paris, the effort would likely drain it of the strength and mobility needed for a final swing to the east and the climactic battle that was the plan’s whole point. “Before the Germans reach the Somme or the Oise,” he wrote when his plan was still in gestation, “they will have realized, like other conquerors before them, that they are too weak for the whole enterprise.” Even after his retirement, Schlieffen never stopped tormenting himself with such questions. Part of his legend is that in January 1913, as he lay dying, he became conscious just long enough to say, “It must come to a fight. Only keep the right wing strong!”

  The younger Moltke, like Schlieffen a bookish and introspective man, unlike Schlieffen a man with many nonmilitary interests (he was an accomplished cellist, followed his wife into occult religious practices, and raised Prussian eyebrows by taking books by Goethe on maneuvers), inherited not only the plan but his predecessor’s obsession with it. By 1911 he decided that it would be unnecessary and unwise to invade Holland; the Germans could neither take the time to defeat the Dutch army before advancing on France nor allow that army to stand undefeated and hostile on the northern edge of the route to Paris. Moltke said, too, that Germany would need neutral Holland as a “windpipe” through which to get access to supplies. In doing so he again exposed his doubts about the plausibility of the entire plan: a campaign that ended in victory after six weeks would have no need for a windpipe.

  The most challenging aspect of Moltke’s change was that it would crowd the armies of the Schlieffen right wing—more than half a million men with all their artillery and support—into a twelve-mile-wide passage south of Holland and north of the Ardennes Forest. This would give them far fewer roads and rail lines to use—no small complication when hundreds of thousands of troops and their supply trains had to be moved great distances as rapidly as possible. It also meant that the Germans would be unable to go around, but would have to attack and destroy, the powerful network of fortresses that the Belgians had constructed at Liège just inside their border with Germany. For this reason German mobilization required an immediate invasion of Belgium: Moltke’s entire strategy would collapse if the Belgians were given time to ready their Liège defenses. The Schlieffen Plan itself, Moltke had said, “will hardly be possible unless Liège is in our hands. The fortress must therefore be taken at once…the possession of Liège is the sine qua non of our advance.”

  Moltke came to believe that Germany could not afford to concentrate such an overwhelmingly large part of its forces in the attacking right wing. As the years passed, he altered the distribution of his troops so that the right wing would be only three times the size o
f the left, not seven as Schlieffen had prescribed. In its 1914 iteration the plan entailed positioning fifty-five divisions north of the fortified city of Metz, which lay directly to the east of Paris, with twenty-three divisions in a defensive posture farther south. Schlieffen, with fewer divisions to deploy, had assigned fifty-nine to the north and only nine to the left. This change, though controversial ever since, was certainly rational; after 1910 the French army, like the Russian, had become much more formidable than it had been in Schlieffen’s day. It was bigger, better trained, better equipped, better led, and more professional overall. It was sure to be ready with an offensive of its own, and Moltke and his staff guessed rightly that its attack force would be concentrated somewhere south of Belgium and therefore opposite the relatively weak German left wing. If the French broke through into Germany, they might then be able to swing to the north, cut the German right wing off from its home base, and achieve their own quick victory.

  But in broad terms, and without any apparent enthusiasm or even anything approaching real confidence, Moltke embraced Schlieffen’s approach. There is no evidence that he ever seriously considered not keeping it—that he ever thought through, for example, the potentially immense advantages of reverting to his uncle’s idea and standing on the defensive in the west at least for a while, forcing the French to attack him if they wanted a war. In 1913 he abandoned an alternative plan that his staff had until then been updating regularly and keeping ready for use—one for directing Germany’s offensive capabilities toward Russia. When the crisis came, therefore, he had no alternative.

  Perhaps he was unable to think through the ramifications of the strategic situation in Europe (one such ramification being the certain fact that Britain would never have gone to war if France had attacked Germany rather than vice versa). More likely he was in the grip of a fever that infected all the military planners of Europe in the years leading up to 1914, the French especially but the Germans and others to a more limited extent. This was “the cult of the offensive”—the belief that the only way to succeed in war was to attack your enemy as quickly as possible and then stay on the attack regardless of the consequences. This belief was rooted in what everyone took to be the lessons of the Franco-Prussian War, in which many of the most senior generals of 1914 had taken part at the beginning of their careers. In that war the forces of Napoleon III had allowed the Prussians to seize and keep the initiative, and the results had been disastrous. Probably this idea played some part in Molke’s strategic decisions. It is also possibly true, for all that even Moltke’s severest critics really know, that no alternative to his final version of the Schlieffen Plan could have produced better results.

  In the thirty days following the start of the war, mobilization increased the German army from its peacetime strength of seven hundred and sixty-one thousand men to slightly more than two million. This ocean of humanity was organized into eighty-seven infantry divisions averaging some eighteen thousand men each, plus another eleven cavalry divisions. These divisions formed eight field armies, each commanded by a full general. Seven took up positions along Germany’s western border, and the last stood alone in faraway East Prussia with responsibility for holding off whatever Russia threw at it. To the south of East Prussia, separated from it by Russian Poland, was Austria-Hungary, with an initial mobilized force of 1.3 million men—forty-nine infantry and eleven cavalry divisions under Conrad von Hötzendorf. Farther south still was Serbia, with a tough, experienced, and almost fanatically dedicated army of some two hundred and fifty thousand troops making up twelve and a half divisions. Also opposing Germany and Austria was a Russian army whose three and a half million troops were organized into 114 infantry and thirty-six cavalry divisions and had the potential, given Russia’s immense population, to grow much larger. This was “the Russian steamroller,” the sheer size of which made it a chilling threat for the German and Austrian planners. To the west, thirty days after mobilization, France had 1.8 million men under arms (all the numbers given here would soon be dwarfed by floods of new volunteers and conscripts) and organized into ninety divisions—eighty infantry and ten cavalry.

  Even without possible British and Belgian involvement, therefore, the Germans and Austrians began at an overwhelming manpower disadvantage in the east. In the west the German armies were at best equal in size to those of the French. In their advance on Paris they would be facing the only military organization in the world that was comparable to theirs not only in manpower but in fighting capability as well—a huge modern army whose generals had a secret plan of their own for swift and conclusive victory.

  Background: Paris in 1914

  PARIS IN 1914

  THE START OF THE WAR CAME AS A FAR GREATER SHOCK to Paris than to Berlin, Budapest, St. Petersburg, or Vienna. Until almost the end of the July crisis, the French paid it little attention. They, and the newspapers they read, were focused instead on a lady named Henriette Caillaux.

  Not that the lady and the war are entirely unrelated. Among the what-ifs of 1914 is the intriguing possibility—remote to be sure, but real nonetheless—that the war might have been averted if not for six pistol shots fired by Madame Caillaux 101 days before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.

  Madame Caillaux was the wife—the second wife, importantly, just as he was her second husband—of Joseph Caillaux, a former French premier who in early 1914 was making a serious bid to become once again the head of the government. In arm’s-length partnership with a brilliant and charismatic Socialist leader named Jean Jaurès, Caillaux was campaigning to displace the men who, a year earlier, had enacted a controversial measure aimed at improving France’s readiness for war. This measure was a requirement, demanded by President Poincaré and the leadership of the army, that every military conscript (and France was drafting 80 percent of its eligible men by that time, as opposed to 56 percent in Germany) must spend three years on active service, rather than two as in the recent past. The change had been one expression of a surge of patriotic fervor that arose in the wake of a French-German showdown over control of Morocco in 1911 and swept Poincaré into the presidency two years later. (When the Germans ended that showdown by backing down, in large part because Britain was siding with France, it seemed proof that France’s long period of weakness on the international stage had ended at last.) Supporters of the extension were convinced that unless France maintained its credibility as a military power, it would lose the confidence of its Russian ally and be left to face Germany alone. Jaurès was insistent that the European arms race was madness, that a general war would be ruinous for everyone involved no matter who won, that it was ridiculous for the only republic in Europe to tie itself to a regime as antediluvian as tsarist Russia, and that it was not impossible for France and Germany to come to an understanding. Though Caillaux had not pledged himself to repeal the extension, the conservatives convinced themselves that he would do so if given the opportunity. They did everything in their power to turn him into what the writer-politician Maurice Barrès said he already was: “the most hated man in France.”

  A national election was scheduled for early summer. It would decide the membership of the Chamber of Deputies, which in turn would choose the next premier. (The premiership, a position analogous to that of British prime minister, changed hands more or less annually as shifting coalitions of France’s many factions caused governments to rise and fall. It is not to be confused with the presidency, an elective office with a fixed six-year term and roughly comparable to Britain’s monarch.) The election became a referendum on the three-year-service question and, by implication, on France’s place in the European balance of power.

  Joseph Caillaux, the leading opponent of the Poincaré camp, was an interesting figure if not an altogether appealing human being. Trained in accounting and as an auditor, meticulous as only a dedicated accountant can be, he had followed his father into politics and had risen to cabinet rank on the basis of hard work and his knowledge (unusual in the Chamber of Deputies) of the i
ntricacies of budgeting, taxation, and finance. At an early age he became minister of finance, an office to which his unrivaled competency would cause him to be returned repeatedly over the years. Haughty to the point of insufferable arrogance, rich, impeccably honest and therefore able to survive the numberless accusations hurled at him over the years, he remained throughout his career the very picture of stuffy, almost comic haut bourgeois respectability.

  Paradoxically, by 1914 Caillaux had moved about as far to the left as it was possible for a French politician to move in those days and still be a contender for the highest offices of government. This had happened gradually, as a result of his mastery of finance. He had conducted a study of the tax system and, offended by its inadequacy to the needs of a modern state, had proposed an income tax. The idea horrified the conservatives, who predictably had no interest in surrendering their exemption from being taxed. But it won Caillaux so many new friends in the so-called Radical faction (which in fact was not radical at all but barely left of center) that he became for a time premier.

  Caillaux’s tenure as premier included the 1911 Moroccan crisis, and he had been firm and effective in negotiating a settlement with the Germans. Though his enemies accused him, inevitably, of bending under German pressure, he had won for France the colony of Morocco at the lowest price Berlin was prepared to accept short of war. It was also during Caillaux’s premiership that General Joseph Joffre was made head of the French general staff, which meant that, in the years just before the war, the army had a commander who insisted on better training, better equipment, and promotion on the basis of ability and performance. Even in his skepticism about the military service extension, Caillaux never challenged the idea that France should be militarily strong. His questions were about how strength could best be achieved. Keeping many thousands of men on active duty for an additional year required heavy spending for barracks and other facilities, but it did little to increase the size of the army upon mobilization. Caillaux wanted to invest in artillery (in which France was seriously deficient) and innovations such as aircraft.