On the Prussian side, there were the usual plaudits for the strategies of the victors. Moltke was hailed as the military genius who delivered the victory, but the compliments served only to disguise the failings that, to neutral observers, were all too obvious. As in the two previous conflicts, Moltke had ignored Haupt’s basic set of rules, which, had they been followed, would greatly have increased the effectiveness of the railways and created a much more effective supply line for the second part of the war. Pratt is again pretty damning, suggesting that ‘a common mistake has been the attributing to Germany of a far higher degree of credit in regard to the alleged perfection of her preparation for the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 than she is really entitled to claim’.40 Moltke, though, emerged with an even greater understanding that railways were the key to modern warfare. According to Barbara Tuchman: ‘“Build no more fortresses, build railways”, ordered the elder Moltke who had laid out his strategy on a railway map and bequeathed the dogma that railways are the key to war.’41
The Prussians had, out of necessity, learnt that the old methods of keeping an army’s supplies replenished were still necessary if there was no railway line of communication. They had discovered that a large mobile army could still live off the country in the same way that Napoleon’s troops had seventy years before, provided it was in summer and they were in a fertile agricultural area. Moltke’s troops had survived because they had dispersed across a wide front rather than concentrated in a small area. Moltke, therefore, might have been of the age of the railway and understood its advantages, but the strategic movement of his troops in this war was still determined, at times, not so much by the existence of the railway but, rather, by the ability to forage for food.
Once armies came to a halt, however, life without railways was extremely difficult. When the Prussians besieged Metz, their supplies had run very short and the logistical bottleneck was only solved thanks to the considerable effort of the train companies, and the proximity of the railheads. The armies besieging Paris had faced even greater difficulties and the military function of the troops had effectively been abandoned for a two-month period while they were sent out into the countryside to harvest the crops and bring them to the front. It would be the last time in history that an army would be forced to carry out such a function.42
If France did have, according to neutral observers, the better railways, how come it lost the war? In one word, incompetence. The French learnt that while the railways were adept at enabling far larger armies than previously to be delivered to a battle site, thereby increasing the scale on which wars could be fought, when things went wrong the enormous numbers involved meant that the scale of chaos increased commensurately. According to a renowned war historian, Brian Bond, despite French troops having a better rifle than their Prussian counterparts and the country boasting a better railway network, ‘these assets could not offset the disastrous higher direction of the war by Napoleon III, compounded by the machinations of his empress [Eugénie, the conservative Spanish countess who was a friend of Queen Victoria and lived until 1920] and the irresolution of its principal army commanders, Bazaine and MacMahon’.43 Bond points out that the Prussians actually lost more men in the opening frontier battles which proved decisive, and had the French resisted these early attacks more fervently, the result might well have been different. Instead, the Prussians were allowed to get between the two French armies and Paris, leading to the ultimate humiliation at Sedan.
Despite the overall disappointing performance of the railways – or rather, the failure of the military to make proper use of them – they were crucial, decisive even, during two key phases of the war. Firstly, as we have seen, the railways ensured the rapid mobilization of the Prussian troops, as had been planned, with the result, according to Allan Mitchell, that the outcome was never in doubt ‘once the initial encounters had been decided on the Franco-German border. German victory was sealed by superior rail transportation’;44 and secondly, the bombardment of Paris by a sitting army would never have been possible without supplies arriving by rail as the assault required ‘the concentration in a small space of very large masses of men and heavy expenditure of artillery ammunition’.45
The Franco-Prussian war dispelled the hopes of assorted idealists and strategic thinkers that the creation of the railways and their ability to deliver supplies to entrenched defenders would make the waging of war so difficult as to deter any attempt at aggression once and for all. Friedrich List, an early German railway pioneer and something of an idealist, had hoped that railways would put an end to war because the ‘greater speed in movement would always assist the defender’.46 A British writer, W. Bridges Adams, had expressed similar thoughts in an 1859 magazine article arguing that the railway was ‘emphatically the offspring and tool of civilisation… a weapon of defence and not of attack, and is easily rendered useless to an invading enemy’.47 While Moltke had been influenced by this thinking, ‘reasoning that whereas a defender would have full use of his own network, the attacker would not be able to rely on any lines in advance of his front’,48 his own war experience would expose the flaws in this line of thinking. While the railways definitely gave the defenders the edge in a conflict because of the logistical difficulties faced by an invader, ultimately that advantage would be lost if the railways were not properly managed. This puts the French performance in context and it is impossible to resile from the fact their mismanagement of the railways was a story of stunning incompetence that cost the country the war – and changed the course of history.
Worse, the victory of the invading forces gave the military strategists the wrong impression about the railways. As we shall see in Chapter Six, military planning over the next forty years running up to the First World War was based on the mistaken notion that railways gave the offensive side the advantage. The French blundering on the railways therefore not only caused their defeat but helped stimulate the military build-up that resulted in the First World War. Had Moltke’s successors, Schlieffen and the younger Moltke, realized that the victory was more the result of French errors than Prussian brilliance, the tragedy of 1914, stimulated by the twin notions that attacking first was essential and that swift victory was possible, might never have happened.
As in the Austrian conflict, a longer Franco-Prussian war or a more static one, like 1914-18, would certainly have dented Moltke’s reputation for genius. Indeed, van Creveld is highly critical of Moltke’s performance: ‘An interesting aspect of the railway problem is the failure of Moltke and the general staff to learn from experience. Every one of the obstacles that arose in 1870 had already been rehearsed in 1866, and yet they were allowed not only to recur but to become infinitely worse.’ As we have seen, the rules set down by Haupt would have solved many of these problems. The Prussian army was not enormous and each corps – of around 50,000 men – could have been supplied with food, ammunition and forage with, say, six or seven trains per day, easily within the capacity of one well-organized single-track line.
Thanks to the railways’ ability to deliver vast numbers of troops – albeit inefficiently on the French side – the Franco-Prussian War was a remarkably bloody affair with more than 180,000 soldiers killed, around 10 per cent of the participants, a high number given the conflict lasted barely ten months and most of the fighting was over within six. The next major war in Europe would, of course, be even bloodier. In the intervening period, however, the railways would figure in a number of colonial and minor wars where gradually the lessons of how to use them to best effect would be learnt.
FIVE
THE NEW WEAPON OF WAR
The world in which the 1914 war would break out was very different from the mid-Victorian age of 1870. Europe largely industrialized in the intervening period, partly thanks to the stunning growth of the railways, which would nearly triple in size from 65,000 miles to 180,000 in those four and a half decades with, in particular, northern and central European countries seeing rapid expansion of their networks. With t
he exception of a few minor wars, there was peace in Europe throughout this period, but it was an uneasy one, constantly at risk of being broken by the frequent bouts of sabre-rattling, stimulated by xenophobic governments and encouraged by the media. There was no shortage of potential sources of conflict, notably the continued weakening of both the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, as well as the militarization of Germany and the fluctuating state of alliances, but these tensions, for the time being, did not break out into all-out war.
On the fringes of Europe, however, and in the colonies, there were several wars, notably in Africa, during which the various aspects of the performance of railways in wartime were tested. The growing power of Japan, contrasting with the weakness of China and Russia, resulted in a series of conflicts culminating in the massive Russo-Japanese War, in which that most ambitious of military railways, the Trans-Siberian played a central role. In several other places, too, railways were being designed and built specifically for military purposes while elsewhere the perennial problems of destruction and sabotage, lack of logistical nous and rows between military and railway administrations were in evidence during conflicts. There was, too, a growing realization that civilian railways could easily be turned over to military use with little adaptation – a longer platform here, a set of sidings there – with the military therefore trying to dictate the location and extent of railways. In India, for example, work on the railway network was greatly speeded up after the quashing of the bloody mutiny in 1857. The British rulers saw the railways quite explicitly as an adjunct to military force. There was a clear equation: the more railways that were available to move troops quickly around the country, the fewer garrisons would be needed and consequently, while the cost of building railways was high, it might well be cheaper than not having them in the long run.
From the point of view of the railways, the two most important conflicts during this period both occurred outside Europe. The Boer War proved to be a testing ground for the British use of railways in war, and not only pitted a guerrilla force against an army making heavy use of the railways but also saw the most intensive use of armoured trains in any nineteenth-century war, while the Russo-Japanese War was in every respect a railway war.
The Russians were involved, too, in one of the few conflicts on European soil during this period, when they demonstrated the clear advantages of building railways to further a military campaign in their war against the Ottoman Turks in 1877-8. This short but bloody war was a legacy of their defeat in the Crimea a quarter of a century previously and triggered by the ongoing collapse of the Ottoman Empire controlled by Turkey. The war came at the end of one of those perennial Balkan crises, which have continued into the twenty-first century, and resulted in a brief conflict between Serbia, Russia’s ally, which was seeking independence, and the Ottoman Empire.
After protracted negotiations over the future of Serbia had failed, Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in April 1877, hoping for a short and victorious battle which would culminate in a triumphal march into Constantinople. It was not to be. As in so many wars, the enemy had been taken too lightly and the difficulties of fighting battles a long way from home underestimated. The logistics proved problematic. In order to provide the route through to Constantinople, the Russians had enlisted the support of Romania, which had until then been an autonomous part of the Empire, and obtained running rights on Romanian railways for trains carrying their troops. Unfortunately for the Russians, the main railway line in Romania was a basic affair, a single track running from the border town of Galatz on the Danube to the capital, Bucharest, and then through to the Bulgarian border, eventually reaching Varna, the Turkish supply base on the Black Sea. The Russians needed to proceed quickly through the country because they feared that the transport facilities would be unable to sustain an adequate long-term supply line for the army since the roads were impassable in winter and the railway line in a poor condition. However, they were soon held up by stern resistance at Plevna1 in Bulgaria, where the extremely able Turkish general Osman Pasha managed to hold out against superior Russian forces in a siege that lasted until the end of the year.
Pasha’s resistance had stymied the Russian advance, so to keep the troops supplied the Russians had to hastily build a line to connect their railway system with the Romanian line at Galatz. The 189-mile line from Russia’s South-Western Railway at Bender, on the Dniester river, to Galatz had originally been planned as a commercial scheme, but now became an urgent military project and when completed was by far the longest military railway built up to that date. The work, organized by a private contractor called Polyakov who had a poor reputation, started in July soon after the army got stuck at Plevna. Polyakov, however, excelled himself and the line was completed in only three months, an achievement that was even more remarkable given that industrial-relations difficulties with a very devout labour force which downed tools on holy days and Sundays resulted in work proceeding on only fifty-eight days. Moreover, it was not a basic line designed for temporary use but, rather, a well-constructed railway with stations and stable embankments, one of which was three miles long, built with the intention that it would remain useful, for both military and civilian purposes, long after the war was over. Polyakov himself scoured Europe for locomotives and wagons to operate on the line. It could not connect directly with the Russian network, however because of the difference in gauge as Romanian trains ran on the standard 4ft 8½in gauge in use throughout most of Europe while the Russians had adopted 5ft.
Galatz, the transfer point, became a logistical nightmare. The trans-shipment of 200,000 men plus all the other war matériel, including 1,250 large guns, from one railway network to the other resulted in lengthy delays and slowed down the whole line of communication. Moreover, on the return trip, the need to change trains at Galatz meant that Russian wounded were seen to be ‘stacked like logs’2 while awaiting ambulance trains, and graphic newspaper reports about the soldiers’ suffering inflamed public opinion in Russia, which had already been angered by the growing number of casualties in the face of the sterner than expected Turkish resistance.
The Russians built another railway for their war effort, a forty-mile stretch between Fratesti and Simnitza in Romania, which was an essential link between Bucharest and the Danube. This shorter line also took around three months to build, its progress hampered by a shortage of construction materials. Nevertheless, it proved vital in taking military traffic from the roads that became impassable with the winter rains and snow. The Russians had also envisaged building a third section of railway, a seventy-five-mile line in Bulgaria, but while much of the preparatory work had been completed, the lack of materials along with labour problems prevented its completion before the end of the war. Nevertheless, Pratt, the original historian of railways in war, was most impressed at the efforts of the Russians, suggesting that they had done a far better job in railway construction than the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War a few years previously: ‘Whereas the Germans had, in 1870, with the help of a Construction Corps more than 4,000 strong, taken forty-eight days to build twenty-two miles of railway between Pont-à-Mousson and Remilly, the Russians in 1877 built, by contrast, 189 miles of railway in just over double the same period.’3 Pratt suggests that the achievement in building the two lines was noted by military strategists across the world: ‘So the development of the rail-power principle in warfare was carried still further by this construction, during the course of the Russo-Turkish conflict, of a greater length of railways, designed for military use, than had ever been built under like conditions before. The world gained a fresh lesson as to the importance of the role played by railways in war, and it was offered, also, a striking example of what could be done in the way of rapidly providing them in a time of emergency.’4
Despite incurring far greater losses than expected and enduring troublesome logistical problems, the Russians eventually won the war after the Ottoman Empire offered a truce at the end of January 1878. The main objective of th
e war had, however, not been achieved. The stern resistance at Plevna had ultimately stopped the Russians from reaching Constantinople, preventing a Christian army from taking over the Turkish capital, which would have had enormous historic and long-term importance. There followed the now customary post-war commission examining the role of the railways, which were inevitably blamed for many failings that had not actually been their responsibility. The Romanian railway was a primitive affair, with badly maintained track, lack of rolling stock and illiterate railway staff, while the Russian South-Western was fiercely criticized for its supposed inefficiency even though problems such as the gauge difference at the frontier and the usual failure to return empty wagons could not be laid at its door. Neither had the South-Western’s poor reputation among the military recovered from an early incident when a troop train plunged into a ravine because track workers had failed to replace a rail they had removed. The commission found that many of the problems resulted from pre-existing issues on the railway, such as the shortage of locomotives, compounded by the reluctance of other railways to lend their own stock. Even when more locomotives were offered by other railways, the South-Western could make use only of types with which its maintenance staff were familiar. Thus, as Westwood puts it: ‘an important consequence of this war was the adoption of a government standard locomotive’.5 In the 1890s, a new government standard design for engines was adopted by the Russians and more than 9,000 of these locomotives were manufactured and deployed during the First World War.
Engines of War Page 12
