Between 1867 and 1870 Moltke continually revised plans for the rapid mobilization of German forces and their deployment on the French frontier. The expansion of the railway network, the increasing number of double-track lines, and continual refinements in planning enabled him to cut down the time needed for this operation from over four weeks in 1867 to just three weeks by 1870. Six main lines would carry North German troops to the western frontier, while three lines were available to the forces of the southern states. Every unit had detailed instructions and a precise timetable for moving from its depot to its destination and had practised embarkation. Arrangements were made for the provision of meals at fixed points along the route. However, efforts to improve arrangements for running supply trains behind the troops to avoid the problems of 1866 met with limited success, as events were to prove.
From 1868 Moltke’s planning moved beyond how to cope with a possible French invasion of Germany to envisage an invasion of France. He would use three armies, plus one in reserve, to enter Lorraine and Alsace, where the French might be expected to gather their forces around the fortresses of Metz and Strasbourg respectively. Once across the frontier, he would seek to find and engage the French main force with his largest, centrally positioned force (Second Army) while bringing his right and left wings around to envelop the enemy. In this first phase he expected to be able to bring over 330,000 men into action against an estimated 250,000 French. He provided for the possibility of having to deploy an additional 100,000 men to face the Austrians in the south and the Danes in the north, as both might be expected to join in a war of revenge. These potential threats made it imperative to beat the French as quickly as possible. Such a war on several fronts had to be provided for, even though in early 1868 the Russians promised that in the event of a Franco-German war they would mobilize along their frontier with Austria to deter that power – Russia’s rival in the Balkans – from intervening against Prussia. In either case, but particularly if France remained isolated, Moltke was confident that speed and mass were on his side, and that his strategic offensive could beat the French on their own ground. For all the care that went into his planning, flexibility was its essence. His memorandum to the General Staff of 6 May 1870 stated: ‘The operations against France will consist simply in our advancing in as dense formation as possible for a few marches on French soil till we meet the French army and then fight a battle. The general direction of this advance is towards Paris, because in that direction we are most certain to hit the mark we are aiming at, the enemy’s army.’15
France Lives on her Military Heritage
The French did not lack information about developments in Germany. Marshal Niel had spies there, and Moltke’s staff rides along the frontier were kept under observation. From Strasbourg General Auguste Ducrot, commander of the 6th Military Division, kept up a stream of warnings about German military preparations and the activities of German spies in Alsace. Some of Ducrot’s apprehensions were exaggerated and could be discounted and even ridiculed because of their intemperate tone. He was an advocate of a strike into southern Germany to restore French power, and was credulous of sources that encouraged him to believe that the French would be welcomed as liberators there. Ducrot’s alarmist reports grew so irksome to the Emperor’s advisors that they tried to move him to another command. Better balanced and informed reports came from Baron Stoffel, the French military attaché in Berlin, who kept his government abreast of troop numbers, improvements in artillery, the role of the General Staff, and the excellent training and spirit of the German army. He had experienced German hostility personally. While attending Prussian army manoeuvres at Stettin in September 1869 his carriage was pelted with stones amid shouts of ‘French pig!’ Stoffel warned that year that ‘war is inevitable and at the mercy of an incident’16 and contrasted Prussian foresight with French heedlessness and ignorance.
Yet Stoffel too was regarded as a Cassandra. The French high command remained confident. The Italian War of 1859 seemed to show that any problems on mobilization would be compensated for by the offensive spirit and their incomparable infantry. At the War Ministry there was fear of any radical reform which might disrupt tried and trusted routines. General Jules Trochu, whose contribution to the debate on army reform, L’Armée française en 1867 offered many pertinent criticisms, became a pariah in official circles, and was identified with the political opposition.
The army certainly looked impressive on the parade ground. Every August since 1857 it had put on a show at Châlons Camp that drew enormous holiday crowds. The troops would march past the Emperor and recreate historic French victories in carefully choreographed exercises with a predetermined outcome. But behind the showy uniforms and the brass bands, how ready was the army to fight a war against an industrialized and highly organized European power?
After defeat in 1870 it became almost too easy to contrast German efficiency with French muddle, and to distract attention from bad command decisions by blaming organizational faults. Yet undeniably the French failure to plan and prepare systematically for mobilization dramatically reduced their chances of victory. Not that there were no war plans. In 1867 General Frossard, a military engineer who was tutor to the Prince Imperial, had drawn up recommendations for holding two fine defensive positions: on the Frœschwiller ridge in Alsace and around Cadenbronn in Lorraine, and had reconnoitred the ground thoroughly. This plan had not been officially adopted, however. In 1868 Napoleon and General Lebrun had worked on another involving the formation of three armies, one at Metz, one at Strasbourg and one at Châlons, ready to launch an offensive. An order of battle, with the names of officers who would command units in these armies was drawn up and regularly updated, though it bore no relation to peacetime commands. The War Ministry was responsible for all aspects of preparation, but it lacked any central senior coordinating body to set objectives and priorities, and ensure that all departments worked together on a coherent mobilization plan. In the highly centralized government of imperial France that impulse could only come from the very top, as it did in Prussia: but it did not come.
Marshal Niel, though heavily preoccupied with the conscription issue, managed a few useful if modest measures. He simplified administrative arrangements for recalling reservists, which would save valuable time. In 1869 he convened a Central Railways Commission which drew up regulations and recommendations for troop movements, but this exercise bore no fruit. Le Bœuf, Niel’s successor, allowed the commission to lapse. Getting troops on and off trains seemed such an obvious exercise that officers and NCOs were not trained in it. The eight directorates at the War Ministry, though each highly centralized and often obsessed with bureaucracy and cost-cutting, tended to work in isolation. For instance, the Intendance, the powerful department responsible for purchasing and supply, transport, pay and the medical service, was independent of field commanders and took orders directly from the Ministry. While it had plenty of material stored in huge central warehouses, plans for distributing supplies from railheads to the troops who would need them were inadequate and would be at the mercy of whatever operational plan was finally adopted. When war broke out the railway companies, instead of working to a well-prepared plan implemented by a single authority, would find themselves receiving separate orders from the Intendance, the artillery, the engineers, and the department responsible for troop movements, ending in confusion that should have been predictable and preventable.
Though she possessed gifted individual staff officers trained at the Staff College established in 1818, France had no equivalent of the Prussian General Staff. Commanders too often used the staff assigned to them as glorified clerks and messengers and did not take them into their confidence. Staff officers usually had little regimental experience and (like officers of the Intendance) were resented in combat units as a gilded elite who won promotions in comfortable jobs. Collectively, staff officers did not bear the responsibility for planning and coordination exercised by their Prussian counterparts, or enjoy comparable a
uthority and status in the chain of command.
Even at best, French war planning was partial and disjointed, with too much reliance placed on improvisation and ‘muddling through’ to cover critical gaps in a very complex operation. System D – débrouillez vous (‘muddle through somehow’) – became, in the words of one officer ‘the great excuse for incomplete orders, superficial studies and half-organized services’.17 Yet some deficiencies were too deeply rooted to be remedied by any amount of last minute improvisation. With some shining exceptions, the standard of general and professional education of French officers was well below the average of German officers. The prevailing ethos was that such mundane matters as administration and supply were beneath the consideration of warriors eager for la gloire who expected to win promotion through bravery. They and their troops had plenty of practice in drill, but almost none in field manoeuvres or how to organize a route march. Maps were in short supply, and junior officers were expected to buy them from their allowances once a campaign began. Even then, few officers had practice in reading them, and many had little idea even of the topography of areas where they had been garrisoned for years.
Many French soldiers would pay a heavy price for the failure to reform the French army medical service after the lessons of the Crimean and Italian wars. Although a new Army Medical School had been opened at Strasbourg in 1856, still there were insufficient doctors to meet even the army’s peacetime needs. Hospital doctors had officer rank, but little authority over army personnel, and were subordinate to officers of the Intendance. Thus surgeons had only limited say in the location of field hospitals, the food and medicine to be given to their patients and the equipment they needed. The whole system, an English surgeon observed, seemed calculated to reduce any benefit to the troops to a minimum.18 The wounded would be brought from the front line either by mule drivers or by regimental bandsmen detailed for the purpose.
The Red Cross organization was resented. ‘The Intendance and the army medical service spoke of [it] with disdain … they delighted in making game of the Geneva Convention, which they considered a piece of humanitarian nonsense and the hobby-horse of a few cranks. The emblem of neutrality seemed worthless to them: “Did we need that thing in Italy or the Crimea?” Hospital wagons did not display the Red Cross banner, nor did officers of the army medical corps adopt the armband.’19 The French Red Cross Society was little more than a salon affair, more concerned with organizing fund-raising events than with serious preparation for war, and there was no formal agreement governing its relations with military authority in wartime.
The artillery, like the Intendance and the medical service, suffered from a lack of money, men and horses. French War Ministers could not, like Roon in Berlin, count on generous funding safe from parliamentary scrutiny. Rearming the infantry with the Chassepot and producing the mitrailleuse were so expensive that the Legislature reduced funds requested for other arms. In any case, Le Bœuf, an artillery expert whose handling of the 1858 model muzzle-loading rifled bronze cannon had helped win Solferino, saw no reason to change it. He was comfortable with the 12-pounder, a weapon the Emperor himself had helped to develop and which had proved its worth in the American Civil War. Le Bœuf knew from Stoffel what the Germans were doing with breechloaders and considered the matter in 1868 when Krupp, ever anxious to fill his order books, tried to interest the French in buying some of his steel guns. Admittedly, Sadowa had hardly proved beyond doubt that they were a miracle weapon. Several accidents with burst steel barrels during the campaign raised doubts whether they were superior to bronze, and they were certainly a great deal more expensive. Le Bœuf was aware that many German officers shared the same misgivings, and he concluded that, pending further tests and the development of a French steel gun, further action was unnecessary. He believed that the French army had more than enough field guns, though in truth the Germans had over twice as many, and ones with a superior range and rate of fire at that.
Even so, French cannon might have been more effective had they used shell with a percussion fuse that exploded on impact, like the one used by the Prussians. Instead the French adopted more sophisticated time fuses that could be cut to detonate the shell in the air at set distances. This system, which made it safer to transport shells, was favoured by the Emperor. Supposedly it simplified and speeded up the gunner’s task, but in practice the choice of preset ranges available was too limited. This inflexibility would be compounded by poor tactics, for French practice did not allow for massing of batteries early in an engagement for maximum effect. Once again it was the Prussians, the victims of Napoleon I, who had learned his style of warfare better than his military heirs. In this field, as in so many others, the French were much further behind the Germans than they imagined, despite the spur of continuing tension between the two countries.
That tension manifested itself in minor incidents, despite official declarations of peaceful intentions by both sides which might have been more convincing had they been less often repeated.20 In February 1868 Bismarck protested against the exiled King of Hanover being permitted to muster his Legion in Alsace, and the French acted to disperse it. On 16 September there was a brief panic on the Paris Stock Exchange when an abbreviated news telegram gave the false impression that King Wilhelm had made a bellicose speech at Kiel. More serious was the reaction of the Paris press to the Belgian railways imbroglio of February 1869. Even after its rebuff over Luxembourg, the French government had not given up its designs on the region. Seeking economic penetration of the Low Countries, it backed the takeover by a French company of the Luxembourg rail network, which had branches into Belgium. A similar deal with a major Belgian railway was very close to completion when the Belgian Parliament quickly passed legislation to block the move. The French were livid. Paris newspapers were full of menaces against the Belgians, and accused Bismarck of again working covertly to thwart France, using the Belgians as his cat’s-paw. Napoleon, who had never taken the idea of Belgian nationality seriously, momentarily contemplated the possibility of an invasion of Belgium. Such a move, he wrote to Niel, would restore French prestige. He outlined the strategic advantages occupying a country that, in the event of war with Prussia, ‘would open the doors of Germany to us’, and, he thought, add 100,000 Belgians to his army. If Germany tried to interfere, ‘she would be the provocateur’ and ‘if this opportunity passes, when shall we find another? It isn’t easy to find occasions to declare war when all the right is on one’s side.’ For Napoleon believed that ‘Prussia will carefully avoid giving us plausible pretexts [to declare war on her]. She advances stealthily, like a wolf, always in such a manner as to show us up, if we grow angry, as the instigators of war and enemies of the unification of Germany.’21
Though he was glad to see the French in difficulties, Bismarck was not behind the Belgian refusal. The Belgian government had reasons enough of its own to stand firm in defence of its neutrality and political independence, which would have been gravely compromised by French economic domination. Belgium had no wish to become the battleground between France and Prussia, and received British diplomatic backing for her stand against French intimidation. Once more disappointed in her ambitions, France backed down. The Belgian affair had highlighted her suspicions of Prussia, the sensitivity of French public opinion, and the uneasy equilibrium between the two powers. The substantial issue between them remained how far France would tolerate further Prussian gains in Germany, gains which she felt diminished and threatened her own power.
The South German Question
In 1866 Napoleon III had insisted that the four German states lying south of the River Main should retain an ‘independent national existence’ – wording included in the Treaty of Prague despite Bismarck’s attempt to drop it. The Luxembourg confrontation made it less likely than ever that imperial France would accept peacefully the creation of the enlarged and powerful German state that would result from a union between North and South. Bismarck was therefore wary of mounting pressure from Li
berals and nationalists in the North who wanted to push him towards more active pursuit of the goal of national unification, or at least the ‘Little German’ version of it. Besides, the South was politically and culturally very different from the North, and at first he had more than enough to do consolidating the North German Confederation without attempting the impracticable task of absorbing the South simultaneously. Nevertheless, he was initially optimistic that union with the South would be only ‘a matter of time’,22 and he set about promoting stronger ties.
The conclusion of offensive-defensive alliances with the southern states before the Treaty of Prague was even signed was a bold opening move, but their publication made Prussia even more unpopular in the South. The realization that they would have no say in decisions of war and peace disturbed many southerners, and fear of being drawn into a war over Luxembourg in the spring of 1867 by a Prussian-dominated North more than counterbalanced enthusiasm for union among middle-class commercial circles. Over the next three years resentment deepened as the financial and social costs of absorption to Prussia’s military system hit home. The adoption of Prussian-style discipline and drill, conscription and higher taxes made sense to southern governments and military authorities as defensive measures, but many of their citizens feared that union with the authoritarian and militarized North simply meant that they would have to ‘pay up, join up and shut up’.23
Sedan 1870- The Eclipse of France Page 8