The First World War

by Hew Strachan

  The second Moroccan crisis confirmed the consequences of the first: that imperial and colonial rivalries could no longer be divorced from foreign policy in Europe itself. Britain supported France despite the technical strength of the Germans’ case. Army staff talks between the two powers, which had originally begun during the first Moroccan crisis but had then lapsed, were renewed, and in 1912 the two navies divided responsibilities, with the French taking on the Mediterranean and the British the North Sea and the Channel. There was still no formal alliance in terms of an automatic commitment to aid France if it found itself at war with Germany, but Lloyd George’s audience - and it went far beyond the Mansion House - could be forgiven if it thought there was.

  These tensions - colonial, naval and coalition - were the underpinnings of the crisis in July 1914. But none of them in any direct sense related to the Balkans or to Austria-Hungary. The war did not begin over another clash between Germany on the one hand and Britain and France on the other, and, if there had been such a clash, it would - on past form - have been a prolonged crisis and resolved by negotiation not force of arms. On 30 July 1914, Jean Jau res, the French socialist leader, remarked to his counterpart in Belgium, Emil Vandervelde: ‘It will be like Agadir. There will be ups and downs. But it is impossible that things won’t turn out all right.’3

  The principal link between the long-term and short-term origins of the First World War is the First Balkan War. The Germans saw it as a war fought by Russia by proxy, and on 2 December 1912 Bethmann Hollweg announced in the Reichstag that, if Austria-Hungary was attacked by a third party while pursuing its interests, Germany would support Austria-Hungary and fight to maintain its own position in Europe. Britain responded on the following day: it feared that a Russo-Austrian War would lead to a German attack on France and warned the Germans that if that happened it would not accept a French defeat. The Kaiser was furious, and summoned a meeting of his military and naval chiefs on 8 December. He said that, if Russia came to Serbia’s aid, Germany would fight. He assumed that in such a war Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and Turkey would all side with the Triple Alliance, and take the main role against Serbia, so leaving Austria-Hungary to concentrate against Russia.

  WAR PLANS

  Bethmann Hollweg was the key player in July 1914, but he was not present on 8 December 1912. What the meeting focused on was the armament programmes of the navy and the army. Tirpitz declared that the navy was not ready for war, and given that the Kaiser’s ire was directed against Britain a large navy bill would have been its logical outcome. But that did not happen: Bethmann Hollweg was anxious both to pursue detente with Britain and to head off further naval spending. The army was increased by a total of 136,000 men in 1912 and 1913. But these additions were already in train before the First Balkan War, and were not due to be assimilated until 1916. They marked the inauguration of a land arms race. In the first decade of the twentieth century the budgets of European armies were too taken up with the procurement of quick-firing field artillery to allow room for expansion; that changed in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The increases in the German army were driven by its size in comparison with those of its neighbours, France and Russia, not by some notion that the German army itself would be deployed to the Balkans. Cooperation between Germany’s general staff and Austria-Hungary’s remained as rudimentary as it had been before the crisis, and certainly inferior to that between Britain and France, and France and Russia. The crisis therefore revealed how the Balkans might become a flashpoint for wider European tensions.

  At the meeting of 8 December Moltke had expressed himself in terms similar to those used by Conrad: ‘I believe war is unavoidable and the sooner the better’.4 His thinking on preventive war accustomed the Kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg to the idea of war, but his arguments hardly constituted a case for seeking war as a definite policy objective. When he had been canvassed as chief of the general staff in succession to Alfred von Schlieffen at the beginning of 1905, he had told the Kaiser that a future war ‘will be a national war which will not be settled by a decisive battle but by a long wearisome struggle with a country that will not be overcome until its whole national force is broken, and a war which will utterly exhaust our own people, even if we are victorious’.5

  Moltke was not unusual among professional servicemen in anticipating that any future European war would be long, nor uncharacteristic among his own class in fearing that such a war would have revolutionary domestic consequences. Moreover, what he had described to the Kaiser was the war of one state against another. During his tenure of office it became progressively clearer that any war would be fought by coalitions. The creation of alliances reduced to vanishing point the chances of a quick and decisive victory. If one power defeated another in short order, the victory would not end the war. The conquered power would be bailed out by its ally.

  Moltke’s advice, though both sensible and accurate, showed how his realism could slide into pessimism: the former was a desirable attribute in a supreme commander in war, the latter not. Many German soldiers, particularly after the First World War, were wont to compare him unfavourably with his predecessor, Schlieffen. But, although the two were very different personalities, their thinking on the nature of future war was similar. Schlieffen, like Moltke, saw that war in Europe might become protracted and indecisive. In an essay on ‘War Today’, written in 1909 after he had retired, Schlieffen described the extension of the battlefield, and concluded that the war would be made up of several related battles, not one decisive victory. ‘The total battle as well as its parts, the separated as well as the contiguous battles, will be played out on fields and across areas that dwarf the theatres of earlier martial acts.’6

  The extension of the battlefield, and its apparent emptiness, was a direct con-sequence of Europe’s industrialisation. The principles of breech-loading and rifling in firearms and artillery were finally allied to mass production in the last third of the nineteenth century. In 1815, at Waterloo, the infantry soldier’s musket had a maximum effective range of 150 yards and a rate of fire of two rounds a minute; a century later, the infantry rifle could range almost a mile, and - fed by a magazine - could discharge ten or more rounds in a minute. A machine-gun, firing on a fixed trajectory, could sweep an area with 400 rounds a minute. The adoption of smokeless powder in the 1880s protected the location of the firer and guaranteed that visibility on the battlefield was subject only to the influences of nature (cloud, mist and night) but no longer to smoke. And in 1897 the French developed the first really effective quick-firing field gun, the 75mm. By placing the barrel on a slide and by absorbing the recoil with buffers, the 75mm could fire up to twenty rounds per minute without being relaid after each round. To protect himself from the volume of long-range fire the infantry soldier either dug trenches or erected field fortifications. Advances in artillery made permanent fortifications vulnerable, and their modernisation with reinforced concrete was costly. But in 1914 they were still used, as at Przemysl, to block the likely routes for a would-be invader and to defend high-value objectives. The strength of the defensive and the probability that attacks would soon get bogged down in a form of siege warfare led soldiers to warn against any exaggerated expectation of quick, decisive victory.

  Moltke the younger (in the centre of the main group with field glasses) insisted on greater realism in the annual manoeuvres In September 1912 the Kaiser, no longer able to lead the final cavalry charge, was restricted to waving his cane Russia’s commander-in-chief in 1914, Grand Duke Nikolay, stands second from left.

  But such conclusions, drawn from tactics and technology, left Schlieffen and Moltke in a quandary. Strategically, Germany could not embark on a long war against an alliance which, even if it consisted of only France and Russia, outnumbered it. If Britain joined the French and the Russians, the arguments against accepting the inevitability of a long war were even greater. Both Schlieffen and Moltke reckoned that the British army was likely to be deployed
to the Continent in the event of war, but that was not the major consideration. As a professional force shaped primarily for colonial warfare, its numerical contribution - about 100,000 men - would be paltry alongside armies which in peacetime approached one million men and on mobilisation for war would rise to three times that. The real threat posed by Britain was the Royal Navy, which could cut Germany off from overseas trade, and especially from the raw materials vital to its war industries in a long war. Until 1914 Germany relied on Chile for imports of saltpetre, from which it produced fixed nitrogen. Nitric acid was needed for explosives, and nitrogen for fertilisers and therefore for food production. Schlieffen and Moltke had to find a short war solution precisely because they recognised the dangers of a long one. In a bid to secure a quick victory Schlieffen scouted an advance on France via the Low Countries, including Holland. But what made sense in operational terms did not do so in economic. In 1911 Moltke dismissed the idea: ‘it will be very important to have in Holland a country whose neutrality allows us to have imports and supplies. She must be the windpipe that enables us to breathe.’7

  The invasion of Holland formed part of a memorandum which Schlieffen finalised at the end of his tenure as chief of the general staff, or just after, and which has been handed down to posterity as ‘the Schlieffen plan’. This recognised that the strength of France’s defences on its eastern frontier, from Verdun down through Toul and Nancy to Belfort, prevented a frontal attack and demanded that the Germans swing into France from the north past the Belgian fortresses of Liege and Namur, and through Dutch territory around Maas tricht. This was not the plan with which Germany went to war in 1914, not least because each year the general staff went through a cycle of revision and analysis which meant that what was posited in 1905 would be automatically superseded in 1906. Moreover, the evidence of exercises conducted in 1904 and in 1905 shows that Schlieffen was considering a number of different scenarios. The most important was the possibility that the German army would have to fight either first or simultaneously against Russia in the east. In 1905 itself that was in fact not too worrisome, as the Russian army was still reeling from its de-feat at the hands of the Japanese and from the revolution: Germany was not so secure thereafter. Schlieffen also recognised in 1905 that he would probably not be free to swing right through Belgium and then bear down west of Paris, but might well have to react to what the French army did as it turned to meet the Germans. This would probably entail encounter battles close behind the French fortress barrier. The Germans upgraded their own fortifications at Metz as the pivot for these manoeuvres. ‘The Schlieffen plan’ was therefore no more a definitive statement of thinking in the German general staff in 1905 than it was in 1914. And what demonstrates this point most conclusively of all is its approach to manpower. ’The Schlieffen plan’ assumed that Germany had ninety-four divisions available; in fact in 1905 it had barely sixty.

  German plans demanded more trained men than the army had available for mobilisation As a result, it called up all its reservists, including men in middle age, from the very beginning This was not just a young man’s war

  Between 1905 and 1914 the relative manpower position grew worse. France was only too aware that its population - 40 million to Germany’s 60 million - confronted it with the danger that its army would be outnumbered on the battlefield. In 1911 it therefore conscripted 83 per cent of its eligible adult males, to Germany’s 57 per cent, and in 1913 it extended its period of regular service from two years to three. In 1914 the size of its army was comparable with that of Germany, and its ally, Russia, had recovered from the de bacle of 1905. On the other hand, Austria-Hungary had failed to expand its army with sufficient urgency and both Italy and Romania failed to honour their obligations to the Triple Alliance. When war broke out the Entente could put 182 divisions into the field against 136 of the two Central Powers.

  As a result, the increases of 1912 and 1913 were deemed inadequate by the German general staff. Moltke had asked for 300,000 but got 136,000, and his chief of operations, Erich Ludendorff, wanted full conscription so that all able-bodied males received military training. It was reckoned in 1912 that 540,000 adult males in Germany avoided any form of military service. Schlieffen’s and Moltke’s need for a bigger army for operational reasons had to be balanced by the concerns of the Kaiser and of the minister of war. The former was of course the supreme commander of the army, the one person in whom the strands of military and political power were united, and it was to him that all the generals commanding the twenty-one corps districts (excluding three additional corps in Bavaria) were directly responsible. Many of them were stationed in areas where the rapidity of industrialisation and its corollary, urbani sation, threatened the conservative constitution of the Reich. Strike-breaking seemed a more imminent military duty than war against a foreign opponent. The Kaiser, too, thought that the army’s first use might be to quell internal insurrection. When he addressed recruits to the Guards regiments at Potsdam on 23 November 1891, he told them that they must be prepared ‘to shoot and cut down your own relatives and brothers’.8 The more inclusive the embrace of military service, the greater the likelihood of this happening. Internal policing was therefore a constraint on the army’s size. In 1914 only 5.84 per cent of German reservists came from big cities; as a result the army was comparatively untouched by the socialism that seemed to threaten the Reich from within.

  The argument about quality over quantity was not driven solely by the fear of revolution. In peacetime the minister of war, a general who had to manage the army’s budget and answer to the Reichstag on military issues, was as influential as the chief of the general staff. Karl von Einem, minister of war from 1898 until 1909, preferred more machine-guns to more men, and rated command as more decisive in war than mass armies. A sudden increase in the recruit intake adversely affected training levels. Charles a Court Repington, military correspondent of The Times, attended the manoeuvres of the German army in the autumn of 1911. ‘No other modern army’, he wrote, ‘displays such profound contempt for the effect of modern fire’. And that was before the increases of 1912 and 1913 worsened the ratios of officers and guns to men.

  Repington’s charge is one more frequently directed at the French army. But all armies in the decade before the First World War confronted the problem of how to mount an attack across a fire-swept battlefield. It was not sufficient to say that the defensive was the stronger form of warfare - nor was it necessarily true, as the First World War was itself to show. To win, an army had eventually to attack. The general solution was for the attacking troops to approach under cover, to close by breaking into small groups, advancing in bounds, and then to build up fire superiority before the final rush. It was this last and most difficult phase that dominated so much military thought before 1914, as well as generating a great deal of wishful thinking. If an attacker could not believe that he was going to be successful, he was unlikely to have the resolve and determination to advance under fire. Good morale and the will to win were essential attributes of infantry soldiers, not the semi-mystical incantations of military theorists blind to the effects of the transformation of firepower.

  The attack across a fire-swept battlefield was a tactical problem. The issue of whether the French war plan should revolve around the offensive was of a totally different order - a matter of strategy. The French knew that the Germans would come through Belgium, but they also knew that they had major forces facing them in Alsace-Lorraine, and that German railway communications to the eastern frontier had received as much attention as those to the Belgian. Joseph Joffre, an engineer, possessed of a large and contented belly and an imperturbable temperament, became chief of the general staff in 1911. He could not see how the German army could cover both fronts adequately, given its size. This was hardly surprising when it was an issue the Germans had not resolved, either. The French had to do three things in their war plan. First, they had to mobilise as fast as the Germans, avoiding the chaos into which their army had been thrown b
y mobilisation in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. They managed it so well that in 1914 they mobilised ahead of the Germans. Second, they had to deploy their forces to allow them to concentrate to either north or east, depending on where the main weight of the German attack came. Plan 17, the final version of France’s war plan, posted ten corps on the eastern frontier and five on the Belgian, with a further six behind Verdun ready to go in either direction. Formally speaking, Plan 17 made no provision for the British Expeditionary Force, but in the years before the war the expectation had developed that its two corps would be added to and extend the French front facing Belgium. The third task was to provide for advance guards to make contact with the enemy and identify the thrust of the attack. This was where things came unstuck. On 1 August France mobilised in support of its Russian ally, and on 3 August Germany declared war on France. Three days later Sordet’s cavalry corps set off into Belgium, following the line of the Meuse to within nine miles of Liege. It covered nearly forty miles a day, giving the horses no rest on the metalled roads, and getting through 15,000 horseshoes by 10 August. The cavalry continued the hectic pace over the next five days, ranging through the Ardennes and as far west as Charleroi. Sordet found no evidence that the Germans had come west of the Meuse. Joffre’s expectations that the Germans lacked the strength to make more than a limited incursion into Belgium, that they would stay east of the Meuse, seemed confirmed.