The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (59 page)

Germany had the option, of course, of fighting defensively but its military never seriously considered it. A defensive war did not fit well with the existing strong bias towards the offensive or Germany’s desire to break out of what it saw as its encirclement. In his last war game,
Schlieffen explored the possibility but, unsurprisingly, concluded that it was better to stick with an offensive plan.
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Moltke simply followed the master. While he did not change the direction of Schlieffen’s plan, however, he updated and modified it as such factors as technology and the international situation changed. Although he was later blamed for tinkering with a perfect plan and so causing Germany’s defeat, he correctly saw that, as it stood, Schlieffen’s last iteration of the plan, in a memorandum written in 1905 shortly before he retired, made certain assumptions that had not lasted: for example that Russia was not a threat because of its defeat and internal problems or that France was unlikely to mount a strong attack into the south of Germany. In the five years after Schlieffen’s retirement, Russia recovered quicker than expected and continued its rapid programme of railway building and the French appeared to be thinking of an offensive into Alsace and Lorraine. Consequently Moltke left more of a force in the east and increased the size of the German left wing so that there would now be twenty-three divisions south of Metz and fifty-five on the right wing to its north. Although his critics later said that he had stripped the right wing of forces and so destroyed the Schlieffen Plan, he left the right wing as it was and found additional forces through using his reserves in the front lines.
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He continued to expect, like Schlieffen, that Germany would fight a holding action against Russia and he too gambled on a massive and quick victory in the west. In a memorandum in 1911 Moltke wrote that once France’s armies had been defeated in a few great battles the country would not be able to continue fighting.
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Like Schlieffen before him he assumed that the French government would recognise its hopeless situation and sit down with the German one and make a peace. Yet both men had lived through the Franco-Prussian War when the French nation had fought on after the defeat at Sedan. As a sceptical German general reportedly said in Schlieffen’s time: ‘You cannot carry away the armed strength of a great Power like a cat in a bag.’
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In September 1914, when their armies had won a series of victories, the German generals discovered that they had no plans for an extended war if France refused to capitulate.
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Moltke made two further changes to Schlieffen’s plans. Where Schlieffen had German forces cutting across the little piece of the Netherlands – the ‘appendix’ – that jutted down between Germany and
Belgium, Moltke decided to respect the neutrality of the Netherlands. Revealing the pessimism which existed side by side with his hopes for a quick offensive, he wrote in 1911 that if the war turned out to be longer than expected, the Netherlands would be a very useful ‘windpipe’ that would allow Germany to get supplies by ship from other neutral countries. That decision meant that the German armies heading towards France now had to squeeze through a much narrower space. The German First Army on the western end of the right wing, for example, had to manoeuvre 320,000 men with all their animals and equipment in an area six miles wide between the strongly fortified Belgian city of Liège and the Netherlands border. And the German Second Army, with 260,000 men, was in an area of the same size just to the south of Liège and in fact part of the German forces had to go through the city itself. If the Belgians decided to resist, Liège had the potential to delay, perhaps by weeks, the German advance. What is more, four railway lines which the Germans intended to use to move southwards met there and it was vital that they be seized undamaged. A United States army study commissioned after the Great War concluded that the destruction of one bridge, two tunnels and a steep part of the tracks would have prevented the Germans from sending any trains across northern Belgium towards France until 7 September, over a month after the start of the war. (In the event, demolition charges were laid but the orders of the Belgian commander to blow them were not carried out.)
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Moltke therefore made a second change to Schlieffen’s plan: German advance forces, moving even before any formal declarations of war, would take sudden swift action to seize Liège. So yet another pressure to set things in motion would confront the German decision-makers in 1914.

Bülow, according to his memoirs, raised the question of invading Belgium with both Schlieffen and Moltke but in neither case did the Chancellor push the matter. Nor, as far as he could ascertain, did the military and the Foreign Office ever discuss such an invasion.
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In 1913, Gottlieb von Jagow, the new Foreign Secretary, learned about the planned violation of Belgian neutrality and raised a mild protest; when Moltke told him in spring 1914 that it would be impossible to change plans, Jagow apparently raised no further objections.
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The Kaiser, perhaps feeling some apprehension about violating a treaty signed by his ancestors, tried to persuade the Belgian king, Leopold II, of the
need for his country to be friendly towards Germany. Unfortunately he did so with his usual lack of tact, boasting to his guest, who was on a state visit to Berlin, about Germany’s strength. ‘Whoever, in the case of a war, was not for me’, he told his shaken guest, ‘was against me.’ Leopold left in such a state of shock that he put his officer’s helmet on back to front.
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In the autumn of 1913 Wilhelm tried again, with Leopold’s successor, his nephew Albert I (and also a relative of Wilhelm through his mother, a Hohenzollern princess), when the young king was on a visit to Berlin. Wilhelm assured Albert that a war with France was getting close and that it was all the fault of the French. At the state banquet at Potsdam, Moltke assured Albert that the Germans would ‘overrun everything’ and asked the Belgian military attaché what Belgium intended to do when the war started. The Belgian ambassador in Berlin was in no doubt as to the purpose behind Wilhelm’s and Moltke’s behaviour: ‘They were an invitation to our country, face to face with the danger that threatened western Europe, to throw herself into the arms of the stronger, arms ready to open, to clasp Belgium – yes, and to crush her.’
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The Belgians promptly informed the French and stepped up their own preparations for war. Although the German military professed contempt to their Belgian counterparts – ‘chocolate soldiers’ – German forces were now likely to face a Belgian army of some 200,000 as well as the obstacles of Belgium’s great network of fortresses, including Liège.

Although the British firmly refused to commit themselves in advance, the German invasion of Belgium ran a high risk of bringing Britain into the war. Moltke took this seriously enough that he placed three and a half divisions in the north of Germany to guard against a possible amphibious attack.
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He claimed, however, that he was not concerned about a British force arriving to support the French and the Belgians. ‘We shall manage’, he reportedly said to Jagow, ‘the 150,000 British.’
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Indeed, there was a long-standing and deeply held view among both the army and the navy leadership that, while the German navy was not yet ready to take on the British navy, Germany could use France to lure the British onto the Continent and defeat them on land.
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The German military as a whole did not take the British army seriously, especially after its defeats in the Boer War. German observers noted that drill and field manoeuvres, something the German army took very
seriously, were sloppy and disorganised in the British army.
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After the Great War, an officer remembered: ‘Every one of us was dying not only to defeat the English, but also to take every last one prisoner. How often was there talk about this in peacetime.’
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If war came, the British navy, undoubtedly, would use the old British tactic of a blockade of Germany’s ports but, as the German high command calculated, that would take time to bite into Germany’s imports and, if all worked on land as it should, the war would be over before the blockade made a difference.

Germany’s main concern, as it had been since its victory in 1871, was France. Thanks to the work of spies – one of whom, of course, was eventually uncovered in the Dreyfus affair – the reports of their attachés in Paris, and careful reading of the French press and parliamentary debates, the German military before 1914 had a pretty accurate portrait of French military strength. They also had worked out that the main French armies would be concentrated on the common border between their two countries – between a spot south of the western part of the Belgian border down to the Swiss border – and expected that the French would probably take the offensive in a war in the northern part of Lorraine.

What the Germans never settled in their own minds was how strong the French really were and, as important, how well they would fight. It was certainly evident that the French military had suffered considerable damage as a result of the Dreyfus affair. Political interference and the divisions within French society had left a demoralised officer corps and unruly troops and the Germans noted with satisfaction the frequent episodes of ill-discipline and even open mutiny in the years before 1914.
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Moreover, the French, both officers and men, treated drill and military exercises in a casual off-hand manner. ‘It makes a very peculiar impression’, the German military attaché in Paris noted in 1906, ‘when one occasionally sees a squad in the afternoon at Vincennes playing football instead of training.’ In mock battles, troops who were supposed to be in a simulated firing line made themselves comfortable, sometimes reading the newspapers which they bought from the enterprising sellers who wandered about the designated battlefield.
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On the other hand, the French did come from the same nation as the great Napoleon and his soldiers and they had a tradition of fighting well, with great courage. Even their lack of discipline perhaps gave them an advantage
over the Germans. The same German military attaché shocked by the football at Vincennes also told Berlin: ‘Perhaps the Frenchman can only be treated in this manner, and certainly in his case temperament, especially in the face of the enemy, replaces much that can only be cultivated by routine and discipline in people with more slowly flowing blood.’
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When it came to the Russians, the Germans formed a more coherent view and one which was more generally shared in Europe. Russia was a great power in name only and its armed forces were backward, poorly organised and badly led. The ordinary Russian soldier was tough and dogged in defence but such qualities were not suited for the modern war of the offensive. The officers, said a German counterpart who was an observer at the Russo-Japanese War, ‘were devoid of morality, of any sense of duty or responsibility’. Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan had shown the Russian deficiencies in the starkest terms and it was clearly going to take the Russian military years to recover and rebuild.
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Even when it became clear a few years after the Russo-Japanese War that Russia was recovering and re-equipping its armed forces, the German general staff still planned to leave an army of about thirteen divisions on its eastern frontiers with Russia and leave the bulk of the fighting in the east to its ally Austria-Hungary until the expected German victory over France allowed Germany to move more of its forces eastwards. The size of Russia and its underdeveloped railway network meant in any case that Russian armies would be slow to reach their own borders. As Moltke told Conrad in 1909: ‘Our foremost intention must be to achieve a speedy decision. This will hardly be possible against Russia.’
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The German high command did not have a particularly high opinion of Austria-Hungary’s fighting ability but they assumed that their ally was at least a match for Russia. In 1913 the German general staff made a damning evaluation of the armed forces of Austria-Hungary. The army was weakened by its ethnic divisions and the prolonged financial and political crisis with Hungary meant that it had not been able to train and equip sufficient soldiers. Over the preceding decades, little had been done to bring the armed forces up to date and although reforms had been started, these would not be complete until 1916. The railway network was entirely inadequate for the necessary movements of troops. The officers, a further German assessment noted in 1914, were dedicated and loyal to the crown but the general standard of the army
was low.
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The Germans nevertheless counted on Austria-Hungary to keep Russia occupied for the forty days or so that would elapse before France was defeated and German troops could head east to wrap up the war. As Schlieffen said in 1912 shortly before he died, ‘Austria’s fate will not be decided along the Bug but along the Seine!’
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Germany had an even lower opinion of the army of its other ally, Italy. ‘The order of march defies description’, said the German military attaché in Rome; ‘every man does as he likes, and I saw stragglers in masses, troops who broke ranks without permission in order to buy things for themselves.’
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Even more than the armies of Austria-Hungary, the Italian army suffered from a shortage of funds and manpower, outdated equipment, and inadequate training. Its senior officers were, with few exceptions, unimpressive and its junior officers resentful of their superiors, their conditions and their poor prospects for promotion. Not surprisingly morale was bad throughout the army.