The First World War

by John Keegan

  Submerged, also, below the surface of Europe’s civil geography was a secondary, military geography of corps and divisional districts. France, a country of ninety administrative departments, created by the First Republic to supplant the old royal provinces with territorial units of approximately equal size, named for the most part after the local river—Oise, Somme, Aisne, Marne, Meuse (names to which the First World War would give a doleful fame)—was also divided into twenty military districts, comprising four or five departments. Each military district was the peacetime location of a corps of the “active” army, and the source in war of an equivalent group of divisions of the reserve; the XXI Corps had its location in French North Africa. The forty-two active divisions, comprising 600,000 men, would on mobilisation take with them into the field another twenty-five reserve divisions and ancillary reserve units, raising the war strength of the army to over three million. From the I Corps District (departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais) to the XVIII (Landes and Pyrenees) the military replicated the civil geography of France at every layer. So, too, did it in Germany, also divided into twenty-one Corps Districts, though there a larger population yielded both more conscripts and more reserve units.15 The I Corps District in East Prussia was the peacetime station of the 1st and 2nd Infantry Divisions, but also of the wartime I Reserve Corps and a host of additional Landwehr and Landsturm units, dedicated to the defence of the Prussian heartland, against the danger of Russian attack. Russia’s military geography resembled Germany’s; so, too, did that of Austria-Hungary, whose multilingual kaleidoscope of archduchies, kingdoms, principalities and marquisates produced Europe’s most complex army, comprising Hungarian hussars, Tyrolean riflemen and Bosnian infantry in the fez and baggy trousers of their former Ottoman overlords.16

  Whatever the diversity of the European armies’ component units—and that diversity embraced French Turcos in turban and braided waistcoats, Russian Cossacks in kaftan and astrakhan hats and Scottish highlanders in kilt, sporran and doublet—there was a central uniformity to their organisation. That was provided by the core fighting organisation, the division. The division, a creation of the Napoleonic revolution in military affairs, normally comprised twelve battalions of infantry and twelve batteries of artillery, 12,000 rifles and seventy-two guns. Its firepower in attack was formidable. In a minute of activity, the division could discharge 120,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition—more if its twenty-four machine guns joined in the action—and a thousand explosive shells, a weight of fire unimaginable by any commander in any previous period of warfare. There were in Europe, in 1914, over two hundred divisions, in full existence or ready to be called into being, theoretically deploying sufficient firepower to destroy each other totally in a few minutes of mutual life-taking. The current belief in the power of the offensive was correct; whoever first brought his available firepower into action with effect would prevail.

  What had not been perceived is that firepower takes effect only if it can be directed in timely and accurate fashion. That requires communication. Undirected fire is wasted effort, unless observers can correct its fall, order shifts of target, signal success, terminate failure, co-ordinate the action of infantry with its artillery support. The communication necessary to such co-ordination demands, if not instantaneity, then certainly the shortest possible interval between observation and response. Nothing in the elaborate equipment of the European armies of the early twentieth century provided such facility. Their means of communication were at worst word of mouth, at best telephone and telegraph. As telephone and telegraph depended upon preserving the integrity of fragile wires, liable to be broken as soon as action was joined, word of mouth offered the only standby in a failure of communication, consigning commanders to the delays and uncertainties of the earliest days of warfare.

  Radio communication, wireless telegraphy as it was then known, offered a solution to the difficulty in theory, but not in practice. Contemporary wireless sets, dependent on sources of energy too large and heavy to be useful militarily outside warships, were not practicable tools of command in the field. Though wireless was to play a minor strategic role early in the coming war, it was to prove of no tactical significance at any time, even at the end. That was to prove true at sea also, because of the failure of navies to solve the problem of assuring radio security in the transmission of signals in action and in close proximity to the enemy.17 In retrospect, it may be seen that a system existing in embryo, though promising to make effective all the power available to combatants in their quest for victory, lagged technically too far behind its potentiality to succeed.

  If the potentiality of modern communications failed those dedicated to waging war, how much more did it fail those professionally dedicated to preserving the peace. The tragedy of the diplomatic crisis that preceded the outbreak of the fighting in August 1914, which was to swell into the four-year tragedy of the Great War, is that events successively and progressively overwhelmed the capacity of statesmen and diplomats to control and contain them. Honourable and able men though they were, the servants of the chancelleries and foreign officers of the great powers in the July crisis were bound to the wheel of the written note, the encipherment routine, the telegraph schedule. The potentialities of the telephone, which might have cut across the barriers to communication, seem to have eluded their imaginative powers. The potentialities of radio, available but unused, evaded them altogether. In the event, the states of Europe proceeded, as if in a dead march and a dialogue of the deaf, to the destruction of their continent and its civilisation.

  TWO

  War Plans

  ARMIES MAKE PLANS. Alexander the Great had a plan for the invasion of the Persian empire, which was to bring the army of the emperor Darius to battle and to kill or make him prisoner.1 Hannibal had a plan for the second Punic War: to evade Rome’s naval control of the Mediterranean by transferring the Carthaginian army via the short sea route to Spain, crossing the Alps—everyone remembers the story of his elephants—and confronting the legions in their homeland. Philip II had a plan to win a war against England in 1588: sail the Armada up the Channel, load the army which was fighting his rebellious Dutch subjects and land it in Kent. Marlborough’s plan to save Holland in 1704 was to draw the French army down the Rhine and fight it when distance from its bases made its defeat probable. Napoleon made a plan almost every year of his strategic life: in 1798 to open a second front against his European enemies in Egypt, in 1800 to defeat Austria in Italy, in 1806 to blitzkrieg Prussia, in 1808 to conquer Spain, in 1812 to knock Russia out of the continuing war. The United States had a plan in 1861, the Anaconda Plan, designed to strangle the rebellious South by blockade of the coasts and seizure of the Mississippi River. Napoleon III even had a plan of sorts for his catastrophic war against Prussia in 1870: to advance into southern Germany and turn the non-Prussian kingdoms against Berlin.2

  All these, however, were plans made on the hoof, when war threatened or had actually begun. By 1870, though Napoleon III did not appreciate it, a new era in military planning had begun; that of the making of war plans in the abstract, plans conceived at leisure, pigeonholed and pulled out when eventuality became actuality. The development had two separate, though connected, origins. The first was the building of the European rail network, begun in the 1830s. Soldiers rapidly grasped that railways would revolutionise war, by making the movement and supply of troops perhaps ten times as swift as by foot and horse, but almost equally rapidly grasped that such movement would have to be meticulously planned. Long-distance campaigners had made their arrangements in the past; the idea that the armies of antiquity or the Middle Ages spurred off into the blue is a romantic illusion. Alexander the Great either marched coastwise within seventy-five miles of the ships that carried his supplies or sent agents ahead to bribe Persian officials into selling provender. Charlemagne required the counts of his kingdom to set aside as much as two-thirds of their grazing for his army if it needed to campaign in their territories.3 The resupply of the
Third Crusade, after a disastrous start, was assured by Richard the Lionheart choosing a route that kept him in constant touch with his supporting fleet.4 Nevertheless, pre-railway logistics had always been hit-and-miss; equally, they allowed flexibility, for livestock and draught animals could always be parked off the road when not needed, and live animals might be bought or looted to replace those eaten or killed by overwork. None of that was true of railways. Locomotives could not be picked up in farmyards, while the mismanagement of rolling stock during the Franco-Prussian War, when a tangle of empty waggons in the unloading yards blocked the arrival of full ones for miles up the line, taught the French army a lesson never to be forgotten.5 Railways need to be timetabled quite as strictly in war as in peace; indeed more strictly, nineteenth-century soldiers learnt, for mobilisation required lines designed to carry thousands of passengers monthly to move millions in days. The writing of railway movement tables therefore became a vital peacetime task.

  It was a task in which officers had to be trained; fortunately, suitable places of training already existed, in the armies’ staff colleges. There lay the other root of abstract war planning. Staff colleges, like industrial and commercial schools, were a creation of the nineteenth century. Napoleon’s subordinates had learnt their business from their elders and as they went along. Their practical mastery persuaded their competitors that expertise must be systematised. In 1810 Prussia established, on the same day as a University of Berlin was founded, a War Academy to train officers in staff duties.6 There had been earlier equivalents, in Prussia itself and in other countries, but the staff work taught was narrowly interpreted: clerking, map-making, tabulation of data. The products of such colleges were destined to be minions; as late as 1854, fifty-five years after Britain had founded a staff college, the commanders of the British army going to the Crimea chose their executives by the immemorial method of nominating friends and favourites.7 By then Prussia, under the influence of the highly intellectual Helmuth von Moltke, was about to transform its staff college into a real school of war. Its future graduates would be encouraged to think like generals, play realistic war games, study concrete military probabilities on the ground during “staff rides” and write “solutions” to national strategic problems. After the spectacular Prussian victories over Austria in 1866 and France in 1870, existing institutions in those countries and others were hastily modernised or new, “higher” ones founded, the French Ecole de Guerre in 1880, a Centre for Higher Military Studies in Paris, “the School for Marshals,” in 1908.8 Methods of training, through war games and staff rides, were made to imitate the Prussian; German texts were translated, recent military history was analysed; the best graduates, when appointed to the general staffs of their armies after competitive selection, were set to arranging mobilisation schedules, writing railway deployment timetables and designing plans for every eventuality in national security, often highly offensive in character. In the diplomatic world there was ironically no equivalence; the professorship of Modern History at Oxford had been established in the eighteenth century to educate future diplomats, but the British Foreign Office in 1914 was still choosing many of its entrants from the ranks of honorary attachés, young men whose fathers were friends of ambassadors, the equivalent of the favourites who had gone with Lord Raglan to the Crimea.

  Diplomacy, therefore, remained an art taught in embassies. It was a benevolent education. Europe’s diplomats were, before 1914, the continent’s one truly international class, knowing each other as social intimates and speaking French as a common language. Though dedicated to the national interest, they shared a belief that their role was to avoid war.

  The Ambassadors, for instance, of France, Russia, Germany, Austria and Italy, who under Sir Edward Grey’s chairmanship, managed to settle the Balkan crisis of 1913, each represented national rivalries that were dangerous and acute. Yet they possessed complete confidence in each other’s probity and discretion, had a common standard of professional conduct, and desired above all else to prevent a general conflagration. It was not the fault of the old diplomacy … that … Europe was shattered by the First World War … other non-diplomatic influences and interests assumed control of affairs.9

  Thus Harold Nicolson, himself a diplomat of the old school and the son of another. Among the non-diplomatic interests he cites was, of course, that of the professional soldiers. Though no more professional warmongers than their diplomatic colleagues, they had been trained in an entirely contrary ethos to theirs: how to assure military advantage in an international crisis, not how to resolve it. What determined their outlook was the syllabus of the Staff College and what in turn determined that were the imperatives of mobilisation, concentration and deployment of troops dictated by the capacities of railways. Though A.J.P. Taylor was flippantly wrong to characterise the outbreak of 1914 as “war by timetable,” since statesmen might have averted it at any time, given goodwill, by ignoring professional military advice, the characterisation is accurate in a deeper sense. Timetabling having so demonstrably contributed to Prussia’s victory of 1870 over France, timetables inevitably came to dominate thereafter the European military mind. M-Tag (mobilisation day), as the Germans called it, became a neurotic fixed point. From it, inflexible calculation prescribed how many troops could be carried at what speed to any chosen border zone, what quantity of supplies could follow and how broad would be the front on which armies could be deployed on a subsequent date against the enemy. Simultaneous equations revealed the enemy’s reciprocal capability. Initial war plans thus took on mathematical rigidities, with which staff officers confronted statesmen. Joffre, chief of the French General Staff in July 1914, felt he discharged his duty in warning the government’s Superior War Council that every day’s delay in proclaiming general mobilisation entailed, as if by a law of nature, the surrender of twenty-five kilometres’ depth of national territory to the enemy; indeed, the assumption by meteorologists of the use of the word “front” to describe moving belts of high and low pressure derives from the strategy of the First World War and provides, reflexively, one of the more useful insights we have into the working of military mentalities in the years before its outbreak.10

  All European armies in 1904 had long-laid military plans, notable in most cases for their inflexibility. None was integrated with what today would be called a “national security policy,” made in conclave between politicians, diplomats, intelligence directors and service chiefs, and designed to serve a country’s vital interests, for such a concept of national leadership did not then exist. Military plans were held to be military secrets in the strictest sense, secret to the planners alone, scarcely communicable in peacetime to civilian heads of government, often not from one service to another.11 The commander of the Italian navy in 1915, for example, was not told by the army of the decision to make war on Austria until the day itself; conversely, the Austrian Chief of Staff so intimidated the Foreign Minister that in July 1914 he was left uninformed of military judgements about the likelihood of Russia declaring war.12 Only in Britain, where a Committee of Imperial Defence formed of politicians, civil servants and diplomats as well as commanders and intelligence officers had been instituted in 1902, were military plans discussed in open forum; even the CID, however, was dominated by the army, for the Royal Navy, Britain’s senior service and heir of Nelson, had its own plan to win any war by fighting a second Trafalgar, and so held magnificently aloof from the committee’s deliberations.13 In Germany, where the army and the Kaiser had succeeded by 1889 in excluding both the War Ministry and parliament from military policy-making, war planning belonged exclusively to the Great General Staff; the navy’s admirals were fed crumbs and even the Prime Minister, Bethmann Hollweg, was not told of the central war plan until December 1912, though it had been in preparation since 1905.

  Yet that plan, the “Schlieffen Plan,” so-called after its architect, was the most important government document written in any country in the first decade of the twentieth century; it might be argue
d that it was to prove the most important official document of the last hundred years, for what it caused to ensue on the field of battle, the hopes it inspired, the hopes it dashed, were to have consequences that persist to this day. The effect exerted by paper plans on the unfolding of events must never be exaggerated. Plans do not determine outcomes. The happenings set in motion by a particular scheme of action will rarely be those narrowly intended, are intrinsically unpredictable and will ramify far beyond the anticipation of the instigator. So it was to prove with the Schlieffen Plan. In no sense did it precipitate the First World War; the war was the result of decisions taken, or not taken, by many men in June and July 1914, not by those of a group of officers of the German Great General Staff, or any single one of them, years beforehand. Neither did its failure, for fail it did, determine what followed; it was a plan for quick victory in a short war. The long war which followed might have been averted by a resolution of the combatants to desist after the initial, abortive clash of arms. Nevertheless, Schlieffen’s plan, by his selection of place for a war’s opening and proposal of action in that theatre by the German army, dictated, once it was adopted in the heat of crisis, where the war’s focus would lie and, through its innate flaws, the possibility of the war’s political widening and therefore the probability of its protraction. It was a plan pregnant with dangerous uncertainty: the uncertainty of the quick victory it was designed to achieve, the greater uncertainty of what would follow if it did not attain its intended object.

  Schlieffen’s was a pigeonholed plan par excellence. He was appointed Chief of the German Great General Staff in 1891 and began at once to consider in the abstract how best to assure his country’s security in the political circumstances prevailing. The plans inherited from his predecessors, the great Moltke the Elder and Waldersee, took the predicament of Germany’s interposition between France, implacably hostile since the defeat of 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and Russia, long France’s friend, as their starting point. That presaged, in worst case, a two-front war. Both discounted the likelihood of a success against France, which was protected by a chain of fortresses, undergoing expensive modernisation, and therefore concluded that the German army should fight defensively in the west, using the Rhine as a barrier against a French offensive, and deploy its main strength in the east; even there, however, its aims should be limited to gaining a defensible line just inside the Russian frontier; to follow up a victory in the (Russian) kingdom of Poland by “pursuit into the Russian interior,” Moltke wrote in 1879, “would be of no interest to us.” Moltke remembered the catastrophe of Napoleon’s march on Moscow.14