The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (63 page)

In considering German plans for Belgium, however, the French made one assumption that was to prove nearly fatal for them in 1914. They did not think that the Germans would be able to send a large force west of Liège, between the west bank of the Meuse River, which ran north and south, and the sea. Here the French military were caught by their own biases against reserve soldiers; they assumed that, like them, the German officers would consider reserves too close to civilian life to make effective soldiers and would use them for less important tasks such as guarding communications lines, besieging fortresses, or running facilities such as hospitals behind the lines but not in the front lines.
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The French knew accurately how many soldiers Germany had under arms and that was enough for Germany to defend against a French attack along the Alsace-Lorraine border and to carry out an invasion of Belgium east of Liège and the Meuse but not enough for a large sweep further into western Belgium. In fact the German military, with some reluctance, had come round to the idea of putting reserves in the front lines. Evidence that they were in fact planning to move west of the Meuse mounted up immediately before 1914. By 1910 the French noticed that the German army was buying lots of cars, particularly useful for western Belgium, which was flat with good roads.
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In 1912 French military representatives in Brussels were warning that Germany appeared to have the capacity to go directly against Liège or swing west.
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Here Joffre’s stubbornness proved to be a handicap: he simply refused to accept evidence which went against what he had decided. And when counter-evidence turned up – a document, for example, apparently written by the German general Erich Ludendorff saying that Germany would not use its reserves in the front lines – he chose to believe it.
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Nor was he alone. Many in the French military, swept away as they were by the glamour of the offensive, continued to focus on attacking Germany in the hopes that they could settle the war early and quickly before the Germans could mount a serious offensive of their own. Early in 1914 when several senior French generals gave their opinion that a German invasion of Belgium would go west of the Meuse, Joffre again refused to listen.
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He went into the start of the Great War believing that he would have to fight the Germans in Lorraine and further north, in eastern Belgium and Luxembourg, and that his forces were roughly equal to Germany’s for the opening battles. If the British forces arrived in time, he thought, they and the French together would outnumber the Germans.
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He left some 190 kilometres, stretching eastwards to the Channel from the French town of Hirson just south of the Belgian border, unprotected. If the British sent their forces – which was not at all a sure thing – they would cover the gap. In August 1914, four British divisions were to find themselves in the path of two German armies.
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Joffre’s plan, the infamous XVII, was approved by the government at the start of May 1913 and the details were worked out and distributed to the army a year later. He moved still more of the French forces northwards to the Belgian border and positioned them so that they could deal with a German attack coming from eastern Belgium, Luxembourg or northern Lorraine. The plan, he said firmly in his memoirs, was to get the troops into their concentration positions, not a plan for making war. He gave each army commander alternatives for their operations against the Germans but otherwise gave no indication about what he was thinking beyond saying that he intended to attack somewhere in the north-east once all the French forces were in their assigned places. In August 1913, at a meeting with the Russians, he promised that France would start its offensive operations against Germany on the morning of the eleventh day after mobilisation.
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If he ever contemplated a defensive strategy on France’s frontiers, he did not share those thoughts at any point before 1914.

Army manoeuvres in 1912 and 1913 showed significant problems in co-ordination and command. As Joffre said in his postwar memoirs: ‘Many of our generals proved themselves incapable of adapting to the conditions of modern war.’
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The French army also was seriously behind the other European powers, and in particular Germany, in heavy field artillery. This was the consequence of years of poor planning, lack of resources and disagreements among the soldiers themselves over how the big field guns should be used, whether to soften up the enemy before the attack or in support of the waves of attacking soldiers. Perhaps making the best of a bad job, the French army inclined towards the latter. The advocates of the offensive also argued that the battles of the future were going to be so fast moving that heavy artillery, which was cumbersome to move, would not be able to keep up and that therefore it was better to rely on light field artillery, where France was strong, and use the heavier artillery where possible to support the troops as they attacked.
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Joffre allowed nothing to shake his conviction that French forces must attack.

In the last years of the peace, France experienced a surge of confidence and, at least in Paris, a marked display of nationalism. Its army under Joffre had been given a new sense of purpose. Over in the east its great ally Russia appeared to have recovered from its setbacks in the war with Japan and the subsequent near revolution and was modernising fast. ‘Belief in the power’, said Messimy, ‘and above all the wealth of soldiers in the numberless Russian army was well established in 1914 in our opinion, whether the army headquarters or the general public.’
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The war plans of all the major continental powers reflected a deeply rooted faith in the offensive and an unwillingness to contemplate the alternative of a defensive strategy. Joffre’s plan, for all its vagueness, at least had the merit of flexibility. In the case of both Germany and Russia, their plans determined that they would open fronts against two enemies at once and their military had not provided the option of fighting one or the other. Nor had their politicians seen fit either to inform themselves of the contents of their military plans or to insist on providing direction. The war plans of the continental powers by 1914 were dangerously like hair triggers which only a slight disturbance could set off. While the military and their plans did not by themselves cause the Great War, their infatuation with the offensive and their acceptance of
war as both necessary and inevitable made them put pressure on those making the decisions in moments of crisis. The military advice almost invariably tended towards war. Moreover, the lack of communication between the different sets of leaders meant that the military drew up plans which turned out to limit, sometimes in dangerous ways, the choices before the decision-makers.

The series of crises which occurred between 1905 and 1913 not only fuelled the arms race and the preparation of military plans and arrangements; they served to tighten the ties that bound each of the two loose alliances together and to deepen the gulf between them. By the summer of 1914, more promises had been made and obligations and expectations were heavier. In the minds of decision-makers and, often, their publics, the memories and apparent lessons left by the crises also became part of their thinking in that fatal summer and their weapons were to hand to deal with those who had wronged them in the past.

CHAPTER 13
The Crises Start: Germany, France and Morocco

In the early spring of 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm was on one of his frequent cruises, this time southwards down the Atlantic coast on a German steamer, the
Hamburg
. He had contemplated visiting Morocco’s Atlantic port of Tangier before he steamed on into the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar so that his guests could get a taste of the Muslim world but had thought better of it. The
Hamburg
was too big to go into the harbour and, if the seas were rough, it would be difficult to get into smaller boats for the trip to shore. Tangier itself was said to be full of anarchist refugees from Europe. Furthermore, at a time when the status of Morocco was becoming an international issue, he did not want to do anything of a political nature. His government, however, had other ideas. Bülow, the Chancellor, and his close adviser in the Foreign Office, Holstein, felt that the time had come for Germany to show that France could not have Morocco all to itself. The representative of the Foreign Office on board was under strict instructions to get the Kaiser on shore. Bülow sent a flurry of encouraging telegrams from Berlin and planted stories of the planned visit in the German papers to make it difficult for the Kaiser to back down.
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When the
Hamburg
anchored off Tangier on the morning of 31
March, a stiff wind was blowing from the east. A local German representative clambered aboard in full cavalry uniform, including spurs, as did the commanding officer of the French cruisers which were anchored nearby. The wind dropped slightly and the Kaiser sent the chief of his bodyguard ashore to assess the situation. When he heard that the landing was not too difficult and that there was a huge and excited crowd waiting, Wilhelm finally agreed to make his visit. As he landed he was received by the sultan’s uncle and representatives of the small German colony in Tangier and a white Arabian was led up for his ride through the town’s narrow streets to the German legation. The horse shied at the sight of Wilhelm’s helmet and he had trouble mounting and staying on. As the Kaiser and his party rode between ranks of Moroccan soldiers, hundreds of flags waved in the breeze, women ululated and showered them with flowers from the rooftops while wildly excited tribesmen fired guns in all directions.
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At the German legation the small diplomatic corps and local dignitaries, including, the Germans were later dismayed to learn, the great bandit El Raisuli, waited to greet the Kaiser. Although Bülow had repeatedly advised to him to stick to polite formalities, Wilhelm got carried away in the excitement of the moment. To Kaid Maclean, the former British soldier who was the sultan’s trusted adviser, he said, ‘I do not acknowledge any agreement that has been come to. I come here as one Sovereign [sic] paying a visit to another perfectly independent sovereign. You can tell [the] Sultan this.’
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Bülow had also advised his master not to say anything at all to the French representative in Tangier, but Wilhelm was unable to resist reiterating to the Frenchman that Morocco was an independent country and that, furthermore, he expected France to recognise Germany’s legitimate interests there. ‘When the Minister tried to argue with me’, the Kaiser told Bülow, ‘I said “Good morning” and left him standing.’ Wilhelm did not stay for the lavish banquet which the Moroccans had prepared for him but before he set off on his return ride to the shore, he found time to advise the sultan’s uncle that Morocco should make sure that its reforms were in accordance with the Koran. (The Kaiser, ever since his trip to the Middle East in 1898, had seen himself as the protector of all Muslims.) The
Hamburg
sailed on to Gibraltar, where one of its escort ships accidentally managed to ram a British cruiser.
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13. The powers appear to be sitting peacefully around a hubble-bubble pipe which represents the conference at Algeciras to settle the first crisis over Morocco in 1905–06. In fact, they have guns to hand and bowls of explosives. The rivals France and Germany are beside each other while Britain represented by John Bull looks warily at Germany which it suspected, with reason, of trying to destroy the new British friendship with France. Spain and Italy who both want their own colonies in North Africa are waiting and Uncle Sam looks disapproving.

Back in Berlin, Holstein collapsed under the strain of waiting to see if the visit would go off. A few days later he wrote to a cousin: ‘There will be moments of tension before the business is over.’
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That was an understatement. In the first place the Kaiser’s visit to Tangier represented a German challenge to France’s ambitions in Morocco. At the very least, Germany wanted an Open Door policy in Morocco or, if it could not get equal access there for its businesses, compensation in the form of colonies elsewhere, perhaps in Africa. The Kaiser’s visit was about much more than the fate of Morocco, though: Germany was trying to regain the position it had enjoyed under Bismarck as the power at the centre of
Europe’s international affairs. Bülow and Holstein wanted to ensure that no major international agreement, whether a colonial one or one affecting Europe itself, could take place without Germany’s involvement and approval. They saw a chance as well to destroy the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France and perhaps even the alliance between France and Russia and so break out of what they saw as Germany’s encirclement in Europe. The Tangier visit therefore set off a major international crisis with talk of war between Germany and France, joined, quite possibly, by Britain. Public opinion became inflamed in all three countries which in turn limited the leeway of the decision-makers for manoeuvring. Although the Moroccan issue was eventually settled in 1906 by an international conference at Algeciras, it left in its wake a dangerous residue of mistrust and resentment among both the publics of the nations involved as well as their leaders. ‘A generation ago’, reported Britain’s representative in Munich in 1907, ‘the German public took but little interest in general foreign affairs … Things have changed since then.’
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