by Jack Beatty
“Marianne [symbol of France] Brings Civilization to Morocco”
“The Moors have lost their independence and their country,” E. D. Morel, who had exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo, wrote in the 1915 pamphlet “Morocco and Armageddon.” “But, if it be any satisfaction to them, they have their revenge. For the legacy of international ill-will to which their treatment gave rise, must count as one of the most powerful originating causes of [the] war.” In Churchill’s metaphor, before Morocco the alliances stood side by side; after Morocco, face-to-face. The imperialist banquet was poisoned. In the years since the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, when Britain and France had nearly gone to war in Europe over territory in Africa, “an imperialism already red in tooth and claw abroad came to infect relations between European peoples and states.” A European state system based on great power concert became “so warped by imperialist competition as systematically to reward conduct subversive of peace and stability.” It was as the Muslim warriors wrote to the French soldiers holding the blockhouse at Boudenib: “Your dark soul fools you by making you rush to your destruction.”102
7
THE VICTORY OF THE SPADE
And hope, with furtive eyes and grappling fist Flounders in the mud. O Jesus, make it stop!
—Siegfried Sassoon
A little over a month after the end of the Caillaux trial, German cavalry patrols roamed within eight miles of Paris. The war happened in a world discontinuous with the one in which that sordid little story counted as big news. The year split into before and after, and contemporaries would never assimilate the totality of what was lost on the far side. The dedication a Belgian poet wrote to a 1915 book, “With emotion, to the man I used to be,” covered the experience of a generation.*
It was not only the inconceivable fact of war after a “century of peace” and after Europe had achieved a degree of financial integration that a 1910 book that sold two million copies had made war unthinkable; it was the immediate slaughter on a nuclear scale that shattered the compass of thought and feeling. Bull Run, the first full-scale engagement of the American Civil War, was fought three months after the shelling of Fort Sumter, and the death toll was light compared to Antietam and Gettysburg. The major battles of World War II happened years into it. But, though it lasted another four years, World War I was never bloodier than between August 1914 and January 1915, when over a million men died in battle.1
They were sacrificial offerings to a “cult of the offensive” that lent general staffs the nimbus of “strategy,” wonder-working schemes sold to governments for winning on the quick. The cult of the offensive belongs to 19194’s lost history. For while at least one of these strategies, Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, is famous, their back story in institutional politics is forgotten, and why they failed with it.2
Militarily what the historian Stig Förster has written of Schlieffen also applies to the war plans of the other Great Powers—they made “no sense.” In 1914 defense was dominant. That was the lesson taught by the Franco-Prussian War, in which the Prussian Guard suffered seven thousand casualties in twenty minutes attacking entrenched French infantry at St. Privat, as well as by the sanguinary battles of the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05—the lesson taught by the heaps of bodies that repeating rifles, rapid-firing artillery, and above all machine guns spewing six hundred bullets a minute, “as much ammunition as had previously been fired by half a battalion of troops,” had decisively advantaged the defense over the offense. The generals were not fools. Yet when recent history shouted defense, they insisted “Attack is the best defense.”3
In part they were reverting to type. Militaries prefer offense because it makes soldiers “specialists in victory” whereas defense makes them “specialists in attrition.” Attrition takes time, it means a long war, it asks too much of politicians and publics. “[Long] wars are impossible at a time when the existence of a nation is founded upon the uninterrupted progress of commerce and industry,” the eponymous von Schlieffen, the chief of staff of the German army from 1891 to 1905, reasoned. “A strategy of attrition cannot be conducted when the maintenance of millions depends on the expenditure of billions.”4
In Germany the “demi-god” status of the officer corps rested on Bismarck’s three short successful wars fought in six years. The General Staff was expected to match that legacy in 1914 in a strategic environment inimical to it. The generals had three alternatives to aggressive war. One was politically untenable, one psychologically inconceivable, one strategically impossible.
“Sturmangriff” (Assault) by Ernst Barlach
To solve the problem lit up by Bismarck’s map of Africa—France on one side, Russia on the other, Germany in the middle—Germany could have transformed itself into Sparta. Liberal Germany could have been snuffed out under the spiked helmet, socialist workers conscripted, Prussian Junkers taxed. Preparing Germans for “a long war against superior enemies,” the generals could have demanded the militarization of the state, economy, and society, something even Hitler didn’t dare in peacetime.5
Or Germany could have achieved Peter Durnovo’s dream—détente with Russia. A band of generals close to retirement could have told the kaiser: We do not know how to win a two-front war. Conceding that truth, however, would have “challenged the self-image of the general staff officers and questioned the entire position of the army in the structure of the Reich.”6
If Germany could not escape a two-front war with diplomacy, the general who led Bismarck’s wars, Helmuth von Moltke the elder, recommended standing on the defensive in the west while attacking Russia in the east. Despite its laureled source, considerations of national strategy militated against that idea. “Offense in the East and Defense in the West would have implied that we expected at best a draw,” Bethmann Hollweg, Germany’s wartime chancellor, wrote in his memoirs. “With such a slogan no army and no nation could be led into a struggle for its existence.”7
Privately, the broodier sort of generals foresaw a long-lasting war, a “mutual tearing to pieces,” in the words of Moltke the elder’s nephew and Schlieffen’s successor as chief of staff, Moltke the younger. To the War Ministry in 1912, the younger accurately described Germany’s two-front challenge: “We will have to be ready to fight a lengthy campaign with numerous, hard, lengthy battles until we defeat one of our enemies.” Evidence like that has changed the minds of historians, who no longer see Moltke as a votary of “the short-war illusion.” Calculating that “specialists in victory” were likelier to gain bigger budgets than “specialists in attrition,” Moltke and his generals gave “lip service to the short war panacea” when talking to officials like Bethmann, who promised Germans that the war would be a “brief storm.” Deceived into believing that victory was assured, Germany’s civilian leaders “never felt the need to rethink” whether war was an option for Germany. For confining their candid gloom to their diaries and letters—the war would be “a general European massacre,” Moltke wrote his wife—Förster indicts the soldiers who launched the war for their “almost criminal lack of responsibility.”8
Just as Stig Förster, using materials from the former East German military archive, has prompted a revision of the “short-war illusion,” so Terence Zuber, a retired U.S. Army officer and German-trained historian, has challenged an even greater shibboleth, the Schlieffen plan.
Until Zuber unsettled the field it was universally accepted that Germany followed Schlieffen’s short-war strategy in August 1914. The “Schlieffen Plan” envisioned a gray flood sweeping through Belgium into northern France and then arcing around Paris and smashing the French army up against its own fortifications on France’s western border. On the basis of evidence he discovered in the East German archives, Zuber contends that the Schlieffen Plan was not Germany’s strategy in 1914 and in a series of books and papers published since 1999 has defended his interpretation against all comers. “All the older literature needs to be revised in the light of Zuber,” concluded Hew Strachan, a preeminen
t historian of World War I.9
The memorandum Schlieffen wrote upon retiring as chief of staff in the winter of 1905–06, in the words of a scholar refereeing the debate, “was not the blueprint for war in 1905 or 1914, or even a war plan at all, but rather an elaborate ploy to increase the size of the German army.” Schlieffen fashioned a miracle strategy to defeat the French army and win the war in forty days. But the troops to execute it did not exist and the meticulous Schlieffen never tested it in a war game. The plan depended on “ghost divisions” that it was the government’s urgent duty to animate by implementing “universal conscription,” which, Schlieffen wrote, “we invented … and demonstrated to other nations the necessity to introduce” only to “relent in our own endeavors.” If the War Ministry did not take this politically risky step (which would fill out the army with Social Democrats, precluding the kaiser from using it to “decapitate” the Social Democrats), Germany would lose the war. It didn’t and Germany did. The Schlieffen ploy failed.10
As for the “Schlieffen Plan,” the generals “invented” it after the war to rescue the mystique of Prussian militarism from the disgrace of defeat. The German army lost the battle of the Marne in September 1914 because Moltke failed to swing the German rightwing around Paris to envelop the French army from the west. This deviation from the master’s blueprint cost Germany the war. That was the legend of the Schlieffen Plan spun by the General Staff and accepted in classic works like Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962). In truth, according to Zuber, “There never was a ‘Schlieffen Plan.’ ”11
Moltke unleashed his offensive against France in August 1914 not from an expectation of victory in one battle (and certainly not by following the super-secret “Schlieffen Plan” then in the possession of Schlieffen’s two elderly daughters!), but out of fear that Germany would lose its power if it waited.* War was “now or never.” “The prospect of the future seriously worried him,” the German Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow wrote of a March 1914 meeting with Moltke. “Russia will have completed her armaments in 2 to 3 years. The military superiority of our enemies would be so great then that he did not know how he would cope with them.” He asked Jagow “to gear our policy to an early unleashing of war.” The assassination of Franz Ferdinand in June gave Moltke “his chance,” Förster writes. “He would not allow it to slip away.”12
Geography lent the cult of the offensive a surface plausibility in Germany. To survive a two-front war, it had to subdue one of its enemies before turning on the other; that, say Zuber’s critics, was the strategic dilemma to which the desperate ambition of Schlieffen’s valedictory answered. But in France the absurdity of the cult should have been patent. Under the political necessity of respecting Belgium’s neutrality (or else forfeit Britain’s support) until the last minute, it needed to adopt a “counteroffensive” strategy—defense followed by counterattack. The politics of the French army, however, vetoed defense.13
In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, French politicians on the left had sought to “republicanize” an army hierarchy that had covered up a miscarriage of justice against a Jewish staff officer falsely accused of spying for Germany: “Military values of unthinking obedience and blind loyalty seemed irreconcilable with the democratic values of due process, tolerance, equality, and the rule of reason.”14
Socialists like Jean Jaurès wanted France to defend itself with an army of citizen reservists. Reformers within the military wanted to use reservists as front line troops to democratize the army and allow France to compensate for its demographic inferiority vis-à-vis Germany. While traditional French strategy called for charging across the Alsace-Lorraine frontier at the first shot, the reformers favored waiting until the Germans committed themselves before counterattacking.15
The unreconstructed officer corps seethed over these incursions on its institutional autonomy. It feared that reserves would weaken its control over the army, resented a reformed training regime to instill “discipline via respect” instead of via brutality, and watched with dismay as the number of applicants for St. Cyr, the prestigious military academy, declined from 3,400 in 1892 to 800 in 1912.16
The nationalist revival after Agadir gave the military establishment an opening to undo republicanization and trump citizen-based defense. Since 1904 French intelligence had known that to increase their offensive punch the Germans planned to use reserves as front line troops, but the French General Staff “manufactured fake German documents” showing the opposite. The enemy won’t use reserves, they argued, and neither should we.17
To replace reservists, the generals successfully lobbied to expand the regular army by adding an extra year to the two-term of French conscripts. Plucked overnight from civilian life, reservists were suited to defense but only regulars were regarded as equal to the attack. Therefore, to keep the door shut against the reserves, the General scrapped the reformer’s “counteroffensive” strategy in favor of the offensive à outrance—the offensive at all costs.
Vitalist cant about French élan and the bayonet charge prevailing against soulless German machine guns masked a bureaucratic coup. Staff officers suspected of defense were forced out or transferred to field commands. Even standing on the defensive long enough to read a German thrust and then counterattack was now deemed “unworthy of the French character.”
The French army “no longer knows any other law than the offensive,” General Joffre, the chief of staff appointed under Joseph Caillaux, avowed. In the first six weeks of the war, 329,000 Frenchman became casualties obeying a law decreed to defend the French army against the values of the French republic. When Clemenceau later remarked that war was too important to be left to the generals, he knew what he was talking about.18
Fighting from trenches, the Boers had raked attacking British regulars during the war of 1899–1902; yet British generals dismissed the unpleasantness on the South African veld as inapplicable to the European battlefield and insulting to the British fighting man. As General W. G. Knox, speaking for his kind, stipulated, “The defensive is never an acceptable role to the Briton, and he makes little or no study of it.” For the aristocratic British officer corps, “The Boer fondness for trenches was in fact seen as evidence of their lack of breeding—real gentlemen would stand and fight.”19
Russia had defeated Napoleon by drawing him into its depths, but it too succumbed to the cult, adopting “an impossibly offensive strategy” involving dual attacks on Germany and Austria. General V. A. Sukhomlinov, the minister of war, called on the army to emulate its enemies by “dealing rapid and decisive blows.”20
The generals created the cult of offensive to win the inside game with their governments and then became its prisoners. In August 1914 the clashing armies followed the same playbook of self-slaughter. By mid-September 1914, a mere six weeks after the opening of hostilities, the attacks inspired by the cult—the German march on Paris, the French offensive à outrance into Lorraine, the Russian invasion of East Prussia, and the Austrian incursion into Serbia—had ended in slaughter and stalemate. Reflecting on the last offensive of the year, the German attempt to break the Allied lines in Belgium and seize the Channel ports, the Times of London observed on December 2 that “The Battle of Flanders died of the spade.” So did the offensive.21
“We were all blind,” General Erich von Falkenhayn, who succeeded von Moltke in September and who ordered the Flanders offensive, confided to a visiting military attaché. “The Russo-Japanese War represented an opportunity for us to learn about the tactical consequences of the new weapons and combat conditions. Instead we believed that the trench warfare that was characteristic of this war was due to logistical problems and the national traditions of the belligerents … The force of the defensive is unbelievable!”22
Alsatian soldiers of the Ninety-ninth Infantry Regiment who had endured the “Wackes” taunts of Lieutenant von Forstner in Zabern were used—and used up—in Falkenhayn’s attacks around Ypres. Some tried to desert, but were shot running toward the Fr
ench lines. Caught in no-man’s-land, they stood for the 380,000 men from Alsace-Lorraine who fought in the German army. Treated as “the enemy in our ranks,” eighty in ten thousand deserted compared to one in ten thousand among other German men. The wholesale transfer of units to the eastern front, where they could not desert, destroyed morale, and the last months of the war saw thousands of soldiers from Alsace-Lorraine mutiny at the Beverloo training camp in Belgium and only expedients like removing their rifles’ springs kept other units from following suit.*23
Under Falkenhayn, the Germans were the first to wield the spade, digging in above the Ainse River to check the Allied counteroffensive that ended the Battle of the Marne. This shift to the defensive “must be considered the real turning point of the war.” Near noon on September 3, just as the French were encountering the wire that the Germans had strung in front of their trenches, an aide to a French general opened his office door. “General,” he inquired, “do you want lunch to be prepared?” “Lunch!” the general snorted. “We shall be sleeping twelve miles from here on the Suippe. I certainly hope we aren’t staying more than an hour in this spot!” They stayed four years.24
