The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (62 page)

Among Russia’s military before 1914 there was widespread concern about the new plan. Although he said publicly that Russia was ready for war, in private Sukhomlinov himself was pessimistic about Russia’s preparations.
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Officers in the different military districts pointed out problems with logistics and supplies and raised concerns about the difficulties of communications and control over what was going to be a very extended Russian front. In the only war game to test even a part of Plan 19A, held at Kiev in April 1914, participants noticed that the stress
on speed meant that Russia would have to attack both Austria-Hungary and Germany long before it was ready, and that there were no detailed plans worked out for the war or for co-ordinating actions among Russia’s several armies.
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It is hard to explain the mix of fatalism and optimism with which Russia’s leadership approached the likelihood of war. Perhaps the only explanation is that they dared not stay still; the memories of the near revolution of 1905–6 were too near. If the regime faltered it might die anyway. The war which so many thought was inevitable might offer a way out: victory could bring its salvation. And perhaps defeat was better than dishonour and the betrayal of the promises which Russia had made to its ally in the west.

For France the Russian alliance was essential to its survival. Without the threat in the east, Germany would be able to turn all its force on France. Yet the French never quite freed themselves from doubts about Russia. Would Russia resume its old relationship with Germany? When the tsar met the Kaiser at Potsdam in 1910, for example, many in France worried that the two were going to make some form of alliance. And even if Russia were a secure ally, would the Russian forces be able to take on the most professional army in Europe? In the years immediately after the Russo-Japanese War, the French were all too aware that Russia’s armed forces were shattered and incapable of engaging in a war. The Russians, understandably from their point of view, were also not anxious to make binding military commitments to the French. From the first convention of 1892, the French had pressed for details of troop numbers and dispositions while the Russians had stalled. The French worried about the slowness of Russia’s mobilisation despite its new railways and found the Russian military lackadaisical and vague. As a French staff report said: ‘As a result of her endless winters and interminable communications, Russia attaches no importance to time.’
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The Russians for their part were irritated by the French insistence on precision and detail, even by what they saw as over-punctilious French manners.
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What the French wanted most of all and finally got was a promise from the Russians to attack Germany early while France was doing the same but both sides were cagey about both numbers of troops committed and timing. While the general staffs of each country held regular talks and there were frequent exchanges of visits by both military and civilian leaders, neither side ever entirely trusted the other. The Russians
only told the French about their war plan, 19A, in 1913, a year after it had been approved, and implied that more Russian forces were being committed to the front against Germany than was the case.
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In the last peacetime meeting in the late summer of 1913 between the French chief of staff, Joffre, and General Iakov Zhilinski, his Russian counterpart, the two men, said a Russian observer, were like card players: ‘Zhilinski, not having enough trumps, was keeping them out of play and Joffre tried in one way or another to extract them from his partner.’
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While Russia, like the other powers, had to think of at least two potential enemies, France was focussed, as it had been since 1871, on Germany. It is true that Italy was potentially hostile but relations had improved to the point that the French assumed from 1902 onwards that Italy would remain neutral in any war. That meant that France could move the bulk of its forces northwards to face Germany. For much of the period before 1914, the French military had thought primarily in terms of a defensive war: of letting the German attack wear itself out on France’s fortifications along the border with Alsace and Lorraine until the French saw the opportunity for a counter-attack. From 1892, as well, the French also took into account the possibility that Germany might violate Belgian neutrality and send its right wing down through the western part of Belgium and little Luxembourg. So France strengthened its great fortress at Verdun, some sixty kilometres from each of the German, Luxembourg, and Belgian frontiers, and in successive plans moved more forces northwards.

When it came to the details of French strategy and the management and direction of the army, matters were much more complicated. Republicans had a long-standing suspicion of the military but in their attempts to get firm civilian control had set up a system which was incoherent. Leadership of the army was divided between the Ministry of War and the general staff and mechanisms to co-ordinate the two simply did not work. The frequent changes of government in the Third Republic did not help: in 1911 alone France had three different Ministers of War, one who was not there long enough to meet his own senior officials, and the third, Adolphe Messimy, who survived for over six months and actually managed to set in train some reforms which brought about a more unified military command. The Radicals who had dominated the government since the Dreyfus affair had carried out
their purges of officers suspected of right-wing views and had left army morale, already low, even lower.

Politics also affected decisions about such matters as length of service and training. Those on the left, with the revolutionary national guards in mind, wanted a citizens’ army where men received a certain amount of training but remained civilian in their outlook. The right wanted a professional army where the men became good soldiers, loyal to their officers and their unit. The left wanted a greater use of reserves on the grounds that this involved all of society in its own defence; the right, and that included many of the senior army officers, despised reserves who, they felt, had been so contaminated by their time in civilian society as to be useless as soldiers. Even uniforms got caught up in the political struggles over what sort of army France should have. Messimy wanted to follow the example of the other European armies and put the men into uniforms that would make them difficult to see on the battlefield. The right seized on this as a threat to France’s glorious military traditions. The new uniforms, said the right-wing press, were appalling and against French taste. The caps looked like something jockeys would wear and the officers were to be dressed like stable boys. It was an attempt, said the conservative
Echo de Paris
, to destroy the authority of the officers over their men and the Masonic lodges that had plotted it would no doubt be pleased. (It was on this occasion that a former Minister of War exclaimed that red trousers were France.) In any case, said one member of parliament, the army should use up all its old uniforms before wasting money on new ones. Funding for new uniforms was approved shortly before the war started, too late to help the French soldiers who went off to fight in their bright uniforms.
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Weak leadership and political interference exacerbated other problems in the army. Training was out of date and ineffectual; the quality of staff officers was low; and key tactics, such as how to manoeuvre men on the battlefield, had not been agreed upon or taught.
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It was in these circumstances that a group of young reformers started to push the doctrine of the offensive as a way to reinvigorate the army. As in other parts of Europe, they also reflected the concerns of their own wider society, that its members were becoming decadent and were no longer prepared to die for the nation. In the case of France, memories of the past cast a shadow too, whether the
furia francese
of the French troops that had so
terrified the Italians in the fifteenth century, the furious charges of French revolutionaries at the Battle of Valmy in 1792 which had scattered the appalled forces of the conservative powers, or the troops who had fought and died under Napoleon to conquer Europe. In the general staff, the head of the Planning Bureau, Colonel Louis de Grandmaison, inspired his young colleagues with his prescriptions for saving France. Defensive war was cowardly; only the offensive was worthy of a virile nation. Battles were in their essence moral contests where will and energy were the deciding factors. French soldiers must be so inspired by patriotism that they would do as their ancestors had done and pour across the battlefields to overwhelm the enemy. A sudden rapid attack, said Grandmaison in the course of two famous lectures that he gave at the French war college in 1911, paralyses the enemy. ‘He can no longer maneuver and very quickly becomes incapable of all offensive action.’
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In 1913 the authors of new tactical regulations for the French army accepted the Grandmaison view, saying firmly, ‘Only the offensive yields positive results.’ The bayonet, said the regulations, was still the key weapon for infantry; drums and bugles would sound; and officers would lead the charge.
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‘Success will come’, the regulations promised, ‘not to the one who has suffered the least losses, but to the one whose will is the steadiest and whose morale is the most highly tempered.’
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And, as in the other powers, the French military assumed that the next war would also be short. Neither they nor the government made preparations to stockpile supplies, mobilise industry or defend natural resources, many of which were in the north near the German border.
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In 1911, in the midst of a crisis with Germany, Messimy was given authority by the government to reorganise the Ministry of War and the army command structure to give the chief of staff greatly increased powers both in peace and in war. At the same time he appointed a new chief of staff and, among the several possibilities, he chose the one most firmly wedded to the doctrine of the offensive. General Joseph Joffre was both bourgeois – his father was an artisan who made barrels – and a solid republican. His nickname was the ‘crab’, both because of his size and because he did not move to the right. Politicians liked him and he knew how to manage them well. In character he was calm, even in moments of great crisis, stubborn, and determined to get his way. His career, like him, had been solid rather than dazzling. He had made a name for himself as
an efficient and dependable officer in a couple of France’s colonial wars and as the director of the army’s Engineers. He was good at routine and paperwork and he understood logistics and communications. His supporters, and they were many, admired him for his capacity to make decisions and for his confidence, even in dark moments, that France would win out. In 1912 he was asked whether he thought about the possibility of a war. ‘Yes, I think about it,’ he replied, ‘I think about it all the time. We shall have it, I will make it, I will win it.’
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His opponents found him rather inflexible and unimaginative. As one of France’s most distinguished generals said: ‘He submits to events. He does not create them … Joffre knows nothing of strategy. To organize transportation, resupply, to direct armories – that’s his business.’
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By the time that Joffre took over the French had a pretty good idea that the Germans were planning to come through Luxembourg and at least part of Belgium. The French Foreign Ministry at the Quai d’Orsay and the French national police had both managed to break German codes (although rivalry between the two meant that often they did not share information).
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In 1903 a spy who called himself the Avenger and who may have been a German staff officer, handed over early versions of Schlieffen’s plans. He appeared in heavy disguise with bandages wrapped around his head so that only his moustaches stuck out. This seemed theatrical to some and there were concerns about whether his information was really a German plant to deceive the French.
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French agents also got copies of a later plan in 1907 and German war games for 1912 and 1913 and they got the last German plans before the Great War, which came into effect in April 1914. The Russians sent the French a warning a month later that their sources indicated that Germany would try to crush France first and then turn to Russia.
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There was plenty of other evidence over the years of German intentions: Germany strengthened its fortresses in the northern part of its border with France: it enhanced its railway network in the Rhineland on the borders with Belgium and Luxembourg; in small German towns it built new railway platforms, so long that they could only be useful for the military to detrain with all their men, horses and equipment; and they improved the bridges across the Rhine at Düsseldorf which would make it easier for them to move into the north of Belgium.
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The French military took the prospect of an invasion of Belgium
seriously. With each revision of their military plans they increased their forces north and north-west of Verdun.
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In the years just before the war, French staff officers made regular tours of Belgium and in 1913 a question in the final exam at the military college at St Cyr asked how French and Belgian forces could block a German invasion.
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(Belgium itself in a doomed attempt to stay out of a major conflict stepped up its defence preparations and made it clear that it would defend itself against any power that violated its neutrality.) Joffre did ask his own government whether he could move troops into Belgium before Germany did but was turned down. He would only be allowed to move into Belgium once the Germans had made the first breach of its neutrality. The French government did not want to alienate the British whose help, particularly at sea, they saw as essential in a war with Germany and important too in reassuring French public opinion that France would eventually triumph.
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