The Eastern Front 1914-1917 (7 page)

In any case, the German superiority in both areas came not from supposedly unconquerable industrial might, but from the accident of the campaigns, that Germany would have some besieging to do, and the other Powers would not. The German plan involved attack on French and Belgian fortresses, whereas in French and Russian plans, besieging fortresses played almost no rôle at all. The artillery of the two sides simply reflected this difference. A further accident came to Germany’s aid: she had a greater proportion of her army’s resources free for development of artillery than the other Powers had.
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This happened for reasons that, far from contenting German generals, frightened most of them out of their wits. In any army, the mere supply, transport, administration of
hundreds of thousands of men came by a long way first in the army expense-sheets. In the Russian army of 1913–14, though no doubt it was an extreme case, ‘intendantstvo’—food, fodder, clothing—took 450 millions out of 580.
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But there were strict limits, for reasons to be explained below, to the number of conscripts that the German army was allowed to take in in any year: generally, 250,000, to the Russian army’s 450,000 (and in 1914, 585,000), whereas the armies’ budgets were roughly equal. The financial resources freed by the restriction of recruiting could be passed to artillery and technical services, and could of course also be used to maintain a higher proportion of long-serving soldiers and N.C.O.s, as distinct from conscripts, than was true of other armies. All in all, German artillery owed its superiority to accidents, sometimes unwelcome to the generals, and not to a mighty industrial machine.

The factor that most worried German generals in the period 1912-1914 was the restriction on recruiting.
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Although Prussia had been a pioneer of universal military service, her successors had let the practice lapse, although the principle still held good. The army authorities were not allowed to take in more men, in a year, than the
Reichstag
would allow them; and the
Reichstag
was not very accommodating. The mass-parties—socialists and clericals—were overtly hostile to an army that they regarded as an upper-class preserve, and a constant menace to mass-parties. Even the middle-classes, though they might frequently give their souls to the army, were reluctant to give it their money as well. In any case, less obvious factors counted against significant increase of recruit-contingents. The German navy was first of these. It demanded a growing share of the defence-budget, and left no room for expansion of the army’s expenses on supply. In the Tirpitz years, the German recruit-contingent barely expanded at all, although the population rose by ten million, and although there was now much less emigration than before. But the army leaders themselves sometimes feared mass-conscription. It would mean extending the officers’ corps, to cater for the large numbers of men to be taken in; and extension of the officers’ corps could only mean including elements that traditional minded Prussians, fighting the class-war, did not think suitable. Reserve-officers who were men from nowhere, perhaps even Jews, would not combat ‘the social peril’ as effectively as a homogeneously Junker officers’ corps. The Prussian War Ministry, in the years before 1914, itself offered stout resistance to any application of real universal conscription. Consequently, the military burden on the German people was inferior to that laid on the French people, whose military leaders suffered from few such inhibitions, who, indeed, were concerned to extract the last ounce of military potential from the French people so as to counter-act the faster-growing German population. In Germany,
liability to service ended at forty-five; in France, at forty-eight. In Germany, not fifty per cent of the liable young men were conscripted and trained; in France, eighty-five per cent—that is, all but the physically disabled. In 1914, there were five million Germans trained for war, and of military age, and five million untrained. In France, there were five million trained, and one million untrained; and the French army in the west, together with small Belgian and British contingents, actually contained more men than the German army, although the difference in population, especially near the younger end, was considerable—there were almost two young Germans to a young Frenchman. The French army of 1914 represented a tenth of the French population, the German army one-twentieth of the German population. Certainly, a change was rail-roaded through the
Reichstag
in 1913, but since it was followed by the Russian ‘Great Programme’, its effects were not great. It was not surprising that the German military urged war before it was too late, for, with the military law of 1913, and the cumbersome wealth-tax that had paid for it, they thought that they had reached the limit of their resources: better war with Russia than with the
Reichstag
.

This calculation was given a further support by news of Russian strategic railway-construction.
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The German war-plan had been more or less forced by the facts of the situation, in which Russia and France were allied against Germany. The German army contained ninety-six divisions—fifty-two first-line, with eighty guns each, twenty-five second-line, with thirty-six guns each, and the equivalent of nineteen third-line, with at best twenty-four guns each. The French army contained forty-six first-line and thirty-seven second-line divisions, with, on average, forty guns each. The Russian army had 114½ divisions, with fifty-four guns each or, if army heavy artillery is included, fifty-six or fifty-seven. Once the Russian army had been mobilised, Germany would stand little chance of winning. Her only chance was to knock out France before the Russian army had begun its march to the west; then she could, at leisure, turn about to face Russia. Count Schlieffen had arranged for this: seven-eighths of the German army to proceed against France, via Belgium, in the first week of war. It was not thought that any other plan offered Germany the chance of success. Defensive action on the two fronts could only lead to a long throttling of Germany.

An essential part of the Schlieffen Plan was therefore the calculation that Russian mobilisation would be slow. This was true enough in the 1890s and 1900s. Not even 200 trains could move daily to the western borders, against the 650 that Germany could pass over the Cologne bridges alone; and there would be problems in transferring rolling-stock from Central Russia to the western border on mobilisation. The want of,
rolling-stock and railway-mileage was complemented by a multitude of technical problems, as Russian railways were built cheaply, without that wealth of equipment that western railways had—signal-boxes at frequent intervals, watering and coaling capacity, skilled technicians in plenty. In consequence, Russian planning itself developed with extreme caution as its guiding-light—troops drawn up in lumps, far from the German border, and large, defensive installations being erected. It would take these forces at least six weeks to be ready for action, and even then they would be unable to move fast. Schlieffen felt that the dozen divisions, many of them second- or third-line, that he proposed to leave for the defence of East Prussia would suffice in the first six weeks or so, while the rest defeated France. It was an opinion that many Russian soldiers shared.

The rise of Russian strategic railways struck this entire edifice at its base. Commercial development alone required increases in Russian rolling-stock and railway-mileage which, in 1914, was greater than Germany’s. The Germans could make 250,000 railway-waggons free for mobilisation; the Russians, now, 214,000. By 1910, Russian mobilisation could proceed at the rate of 250 trains per day; by 1914, 360; while by 1917, Danilov planned to have 560 trains rolling to the west every day. In August 1914, Russia mobilised under the prescriptions of the old plan, No. 19 ‘altered’ dating from the period 1910–12. Mobilisation took thirty days for the 744 battalions and 621 cavalry squadrons involved, but was over for two-thirds of them by the eighteenth day of mobilisation. With Plan No. 20, due to take effect in September 1914, and still more with Plan No. 21, to take effect in 1917, mobilisation was to be completely over by the eighteenth day—only three days later than the termination of German mobilisation in the west. Meanwhile, from 1912 onwards, there was a series of preparatory measures. Two-fifths of the army was permanently stationed in Poland, thus reducing the railways’ carrying-task. A legal ‘period of preparation for war’ was introduced in February 1912, permitting measures of preparation, in advance of formal mobilisation, at the discretion of the war ministry—for instance, call-up of the three youngest classes of the reserve in areas threatened by enemy action (e.g. Poland west of the Vistula). These measures, put into effect from 26th July onwards, allowed Germans to suggest that Russia had ‘secretly mobilised’, although in reality the Germans were told what was going on. Finally, to offset the period when a new intake of conscripts would be at their least ready—the first six months of their service—the oldest class was to be kept under arms for a further half-year, such that in the winter, the Russian army would even in peacetime have two million men, as much as the German war-time army. In 1913–14, further
measures of strategic railway-building were announced. The French government would guarantee railway-loans placed in France, of 500 million francs per annum, and French generals made suggestions as to the lines Russia should construct or double-track, so as to make her mobilisation quicker; French pressure even led to a Russian project, given some effect in 1914, for the assembly of an invasion-force in Poland west of the Vistula, an area hitherto judged too vulnerable to be occupied, and therefore left empty of railways. In the ‘Great Programme’ of 1914-17, nearly 150 million roubles, out of 700 millions ear-marked for military purposes, were to go on strategic railways. The Germans were already alarmed that Russian mobilisation had speeded up as much as it had. By 1917, they recognised, it would be almost as fast as their own. Russians would be in Berlin before Germans were in Paris.

Both Moltke in Berlin and Conrad in Vienna felt that 1914 was the last chance. After that, the Central Powers, losing allies, structurally unable to exploit their own peoples, and indeed, in the Austro-Hungarian case, unable to count even on basic loyalty, would have no hope of winning the war that, with every political crisis in Europe, seemed to come nearer. The generals pressed for war, in Moltke’s case from March onwards. The statesmen’s attitude was more complicated, since Bethmann Hollweg hoped to find some device for bringing about British neutrality, and since other German statesmen had hopes of invoking the conservative cause of alliance with Russia. But the statesmen, too, increasingly sympathised with the generals’ statements. An accident, the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serb terrorists, acted as catalyst, at the end of June 1914. The Central Powers would provoke a quarrel with Russia, by threatening her client, Serbia, with political extinction, ostensibly as a punishment for Serbian government complicity in the assassination of the Archduke. Bethmann Hollweg explained on 8th July that if Russia went to war to protect Serbia, better then than later; if she did not go to war, it would be because the French had let her down, so that she would come round once more to the German side. He explained to Lichnowsky, ambassador in London, that ‘not only the extremists, but even level-headed politicians are worried at the increases in Russian strength, and the imminence of Russian attack’, and Jagow, for the Foreign Office, echoed this with the remark that if war had to come, then in view of Russia’s attitude, it would be better then than later.
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An ultimatum was served on Serbia, and was duly refused on 25th July. The Austrians declared war on her three days later. There was some indecision in Russia. Sazonov, foreign minister, felt that Austria should be threatened, but not Germany; consequently, the army was asked to mobilise only those corps ear-marked for the Austrian front. But,
increasingly, most people suspected that Germany was behind Austria; and in any case the soldiers had good technical arguments for rejecting partial mobilisation. It was all or nothing; and by 31st July Russia had decided on general mobilisation. This broke down the last barriers in Germany, where Bethmann Hollweg had begun to have second thoughts. The Schlieffen Plan demanded that there should be at least three clear weeks when the German army, untroubled by Russian invasion, could defeat France. As soon as the first Russian reservist pulled on his boots, the alarm bells would ring in Germany, for by 1914 the timetable of the Schlieffen Plan had already become uncomfortably tight, and loss even of a day’s preparation might be disastrous for Germany. Accordingly, the Germans mobilised as well; declared war on Russia when she failed to demobilise; and began to effect the Schlieffen Plan with a fabricated declaration of war on France. The railway, chief production of nineteenth-century civilisation, had proved to be chief agent in its destruction.
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CHAPTER THREE
The Opening Round: East Prussia

Panic and desperation had prompted the German generals’ behaviour in July. But their mood came from factors that the First World War showed to be unreal. Schlieffen had suffered from visions of a two-pronged invasion of Germany, from France and Russia, and his famous Plan seemed to be the only possible way of countering this threat. But the war showed, first, that armies’ mobility on the offensive was so limited as to reduce much of the danger, and second that defensive fire-power was so powerful that even a superiority of three to one did not suffice to overcome it. There was, in other words, every chance for a defensive operation. After September 1914, this became clear to all sides, though it came as a great surprise.