1918 The Last Act

by Barrie Pitt

  Upon the occasion of the signing of the Treaty, one of the German delegates turned to Clemenceau and said, ‘I wonder what History will have to say about all this?’

  There was a pause while Clemenceau eyed the speaker with cool deliberation.

  ‘History’, he replied, ‘will not say that Belgium invaded Germany!’

  As for the armies of the victorious powers, they were as quickly reduced to peacetime establishments as the exigencies of occupation and the processes of demobilization would allow – although units of both British and American armies were to fight for a few more dreary months in the Baltic States and in Russia. Once the civilian element had been sufficiently reduced, pre-war conditions and outlook returned, and those regular officers of the British Army who had risen to high rank in the divisional and army headquarters during the period from early 1915 until the Armistice, returned to their regiments as battalion officers, some of them with their pure, pristine, pre-war ideas still unsullied by close contact with reality.

  ‘Thank Heavens the war is over,’ one of them is reputed to have said,‘… now we can get back to real soldiering.’

  Most of the wartime regimental histories appear to have been written by regular officers, and it is revealing to note how many times the volume ends with a statement to the effect that such and such a battalion crossed the German frontier during December, settled quickly into its billets, after which ‘a sound programme of training was immediately commenced.’

  To what end the training was directed is never explained, but some idea of its viewpoint and methods may be deduced from the fact that nearly ten years after the end of a war which had seen Britain introduce and lead the world in the use of mechanized armour, the British Defence Budget made provision of £607,000 for forage and stabling, while only £72,000 was set aside for petrol, of which a sizeable fraction was necessary for ordinary thin-skinned transport. In 1933, twenty cavalry regiments of the Regular Army still rode horses, sixteen regiments of the Territorial Army did so, twenty-one of the Indian Army, and there were only four tank regiments in existence in the entire Imperial Force. In 1937, mobilization orders for the 16th/15th Queens Royal Lancers instructed officers that upon the outbreak of hostilities all swords were to be sharpened, and as late as 1940 a candidate for a war-time commission was asked by the interviewing board at Cambridge three questions – and three only. What school did he attend? What was his father’s income? Did he ride a horse?

  It was apparently unnecessary for the ideas with which Britain’s military leaders went to war in 1914 to be modified; after all, the Allies had won the war. They won the next one, too, and it is disturbing to find – even if horses are at last at a discount – evidence of little encouragement to men of imagination or high intellect to serve in the armed forces. On a Staff Course held by the Royal Air Force shortly after the war, one of the pupils wrote a paper in which he suggested that the day of the manned fighter was almost over, and that rockets would soon be developed to such a state that they would be able to deliver atomic weapons into the heart of an enemy country. He received the paper back with the word ‘Poppycock’ written large across it by the officer controlling the course, and was subjected to some heavy sarcasm during the following days. One would have thought that in this Service at least, new ideas would be welcome, and some appreciation exist of the fact that the fantasy of one year is the reality of the next.

  Perhaps the British Public are to blame. The Headmaster of a famous English school wrote to the father of one of his pupils during the summer term of 1960, requesting the father’s presence in order to discuss the boy’s future. He assured the father that his was indeed a son to be proud of – good at games, extremely popular with his fellows, cheerful, of happy disposition and most attractive personality. However, it was no good blinking the fact that the boy was no mental prodigy – he would be extremely lucky to pass any written examination for which he might enter … ‘in which circumstances,’ the headmaster continued smoothly, ‘why not send him to Sandhurst and let him become an Army officer? They don’t worry about such things there.’

  It is easy to see how the cavalry mentality died hard, if this is the public attitude to the army; but it remains a matter of speculation as to which is the cause and which the effect.

  The French Army never recovered from the twin disasters of Verdun in 1916 and the Nivelle offensive of April 1917. The flower of the nation had caught the force of the first onslaught of the German armies in 1914, held it, and then forced the Germans back to what became the trench line. Then, while Britain’s army expanded during 1915 and the beginning of 1916, France had borne the burden of the fighting on the Western Front until Ludendorff’s predecessor Falkenhayn commenced the conflict at Verdun. This battle devoured with the appetite of Moloch the tough, belligerent ‘grognards’ of Pétain’s divisions, and so sucked the lifeblood from the French Army; and although there was enough strength and spirit left in the nation to respond to the eloquent and facile promises of General Nivelle, when these proved empty – at a cost of 120,000 casualties – despair and disillusion spread through the ranks.

  Pétain managed to nurse the Army out of its despair, but he was a realist at the head of an army of realists – and some degree of optimism and illusion is necessary to make men in large numbers climb out of trenches, and walk forward into a curtain of falling steel and erupting flame. The most important illusion for a soldier to believe in is that some good will come of his sacrifice – and when the war ended, too many French homes were without fathers, too many French farms without strong sons to work the land, and no transfers of credit balances from German to French banks in the form of reparations could fill the gaps.

  During the inter-war years pressure of popular opinion reduced the conscription period from two years to one year, and the French Nation’s pride in its Army dwindled to nothing. Only fools served in the armed forces, for the war had proved that only fools commanded them – and with deep-rooted cynicism the French congratulated themselves upon the fact that there were increasing numbers of idiotic foreigners to volunteer to serve in the Foreign Legion. This famous corps therefore grew to unprecedented size, its battalions manned at full strength by Germans, Russians, and the nationals of half a dozen new Central European States, who had suddenly found themselves impoverished and unprotected, as the result of the arbitrary re-arrangements of national boundaries by well-meaning but uninformed officials of the League of Nations. With this force, France maintained order in her African, Syrian and Far Eastern possessions, while her own countrymen remained at home, built the Maginot Line and accepted its philosophy.

  The German armies of 1940 owed much of their success to Falkenhayn.

  When the Republican Congress voted America out of the League of Nations which Wilson had laboured so earnestly to create, they were giving effect to a national desire to isolate America, if possible from the rest of the world, but particularly from Europe. The vast majority of the inhabitants of the New World were Americans simply because they or their ancestors had found conditions in the Old World intolerable – and this latest display of bad temper and mismanagement among the European nations merely confirmed American opinion that the Atlantic could with advantage be made both wider and deeper.

  Once the American Army returned home in 1923, the average American saw little need for its continued existence, Mr. Hoover himself had announced that ‘This Country’s business is business’ – and what percentage of profit was to be yielded by the capital invested in armed forces, when it was the national intention that those forces should never be embroiled in other people’s affairs again? The Army – and indeed the entire war effort – fell into some disrepute, and the young nation’s natural desire to look to the future instead of the past, was so insistent that its treatment of ex-soldiers was ungrateful, and of those with shattered bodies or nerves, uncivilized.

  With Pershing at the head of military affairs, the discipline in the American Army was tightened to a de
gree akin to that of the British Army in the days of Wellington – which was all very well when the Army was ‘the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink’, but was hardly likely to attract the country’s better elements into the ranks, in days of a quickly expanding economy. This factor too, affected the men coming forward as potential officers, for a man possessing the imagination, initiative and administrative ability to make a good general, could also make a hundred times a general’s pay in industry or commerce – and there were no family traditions which put service to the country higher than financial considerations, especially in a country which seemed vaguely ashamed of its latest military adventure, and even of the force which had carried it out.

  The Army which had turned the balance in Europe dwindled in numbers, existed on ever-reduced financial votes, and was kept so much out of the public consciousness that it almost ceased to be an accepted part of the American life. In such circumstances, it was hardly likely to become a very potent factor in international affairs.

  The Armies of the victorious powers therefore languished during the inter-war years, largely as a result of public apathy – an attitude considered excusable by many of those who adopted it, since under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany’s armed forces had been drastically pruned. They would have been well advised to remember that the operation of pruning is usually employed to promote strong and healthy growth.

  Among the advisers to the German delegation at the Peace Conference was a short, dapper man, always faultlessly dressed, of urbane manner and sophisticated wit, monocled in the tradition of the German military caste. His name was Hans von Seeckt, and during the war he had held a wider diversity of posts than any other German Staff officer. He had been Chief-of-Staff to one of the corps of the German First Army at the battle of the Marne in 1914, then Chief-of-Staff to Mackensen’s Eleventh Army which in 1915 drove the Russian armies into the Pripet marshes, and later crushed both the Serbs and the Roumanians. In 1916 von Seeckt had been made Chief-of-Staff to the Austrian Archduke Karl in command of an Austro-German-Bulgar army group, and late in 1917 he went to the Middle East as Chief-of-Staff to the Turkish field armies.

  The width of his experience was thus coupled with another great advantage – that his areas of influence had not been such as to earn him undue notoriety with the Western Powers who dominated the Conference. His nomination to head the extremely limited force of which the post-war Reichswehr was to consist, was therefore acceptable to the Allies and could hardly have been bettered from the point of view of Germany herself.

  The military terms of the Peace Treaty were laid down with the express intention of preventing a regeneration of the German Army. It was to be limited to 100,000 officers and men, and in order to ensure that no vast reserve was quickly built up, officers were to serve for a minimum of twenty-five years and other ranks for a minimum of twelve. The formations of the Army were specified at seven infantry divisions, three cavalry divisions and the Staffs for two corps, and it was to have no tanks – which seems odd in view of the lack of importance apparently attached to these weapons by the commanders of the Allied Armies. Germany was to be allowed no air force, and a navy restricted to 15,000 officers and men.

  Faced with the task of creating a potentially powerful army within these cramped limitations, von Seeckt was able immediately to turn those limitations to one immense advantage: if he could not have quantity, he could at least insist on quality – and from the wreck of Ludendorff’s and Hoffmann’s armies could easily be found far more than 100,000 of the toughest and most experienced soldiers Europe had ever produced. Even the domestic climate in Germany aided him, for the snarling political chaos which descended upon Germany in the immediate post-war years provided an admirable blanket under which he could work, and as always, the mass of German peoples looked to the Reichswehr for some degree of stability in national life. Immediately it showed some of the old, familiar and well-loved signs of authority, the Germans were as unable to avoid giving it their wholehearted support, as a normal mother is to avoid loving her children.

  Perhaps the greatest aid that von Seeckt received in forming a highly efficient new army, was from the fact that Germany had lost the war. Although the immediate and subtle promulgation of the ‘Stab-in-the-back’ legend was a useful piece of expedient propaganda for public consumption, the military minds wanted to know exactly how the military defeat – which they were prepared to admit amongst themselves – had been brought about, and as von Seeckt possessed mental abilities of no mean order, he was able to pick others of keen and analytical intellect in order to probe the question. This they did with the painstaking thoroughness typical of the traditional German Staff attitude to its problems, and from the conclusions drawn were learned many valuable lessons. These were immediately applied to the training of the new army.

  As a result, while the British Army formed fours and polished its saddlery, and the French conscripts endured their year’s service with boredom and complete disinterest, the Germans replaced much of their own close-order drill with competitive sports and training in special aptitudes, and encouraged each man in the army to consider himself a valuable part of it. Keenness and enthusiasm combined with national instinct to form superb soldiers, and as each man was trained for a year in infantry tactics, for a year in the use of machine-guns, for a year as an artilleryman, and for a year as part of a combat team which included specialists from each military arm, they all received a thorough grounding in the fundamentals of warfare.

  Such was the training which was to produce the famous generals of the Second World War. Von Rundstedt was a divisional Chief-of-Staff in this Army, von Manstein a frontier guard, whilst Rommel and Guderian were both infantry officers avidly reading the works of Liddell Hart, who had been discharged from the British Army by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff succeeding Sir Henry Wilson. This Brigade of Guards Peer saw no reason why Liddell Hart’s ability to think deeply and write lucidly should cancel out the fact that wounds received during the Battle of the Somme rendered him unfit to serve as an officer in any part of the British Empire.

  Even the fact that von Seeckt’s army was allowed no heavy artillery or any of the more modern military equipment, was turned to advantage, for technical details of every new development in weapons were quickly obtained during the inter-war years, their models used in training, and there was no political pressure to cling to out-dated weapons and out-dated ideas for the sake of financial economy. Even as late as 1939, the British still possessed large stocks of 1918 weapons and ammunition, and their soldiers were to a large extent still trained upon them: but as Germany had been forbidden possession of many types of weapons, once the German political leaders defied the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the Army could buy the latest models, without the embarrassment of having to jettison vast stocks of munitions rendered obsolete by mechanical and industrial development.

  What was true of out-dated weapons was also true of out-dated ideas and the men who held them. None of the commanding generals of World War I was allowed to serve under von Seeckt – even had they wished to – so Ludendorff, for instance, was given no chance of influencing again the moulding of the German Army or the fate of his Fatherland. It would seem, moreover, that during his term of exile from Germany, Ludendorff’s transition from competent soldier to inept politician – which began with his assumption of dictatorial powers to the Supreme Command – was completed, for his next appearance in German public life was in the front rank of the marchers upon Berlin on November 8th, 1923, who wished to overthrow the Government and set up an anti-communist dictatorship. This – and this alone – seems to have been the declared aim of the ‘Munich Putsch’, as the attempt was called. It had little or no political aim beyond the re-establishment of autocracy, although at the subsequent trial (at which Ludendorff, alone amongst all those arrested and to his intense disgust, was discharged without fine or imprisonment) it did seem that many of those in the dock were of the opinion that
International Jewry was directly responsible for all of Germany’s troubles. The mental atmosphere of von Seeckt’s Army had no place for muddled thinking of this nature, whatever lip service it would pay to theories of Aryan Supremacy in the time to come.

  As the years passed, the efficiency of the 100,000-man army reached its optimum, and the problems of increasing its size without too obvious and too violent an infraction of the Terms of the Versailles Treaty arose. The answer was found easily and simply in the natural existence throughout Germany of such social amenities as rifle clubs, hunting clubs, riding clubs and even rambling, mountaineering and sailing clubs. If a member of a British or American rifle team were told to stand to attention when addressing his team captain, he would probably react with violence and even some degree of profanity – and join another club. But the Germans loved it, and when experts were attached to each club from von Seeckt’s army in order to encourage the respective sport and raise the club’s standard of proficiency, their enthusiasm knew no bounds.

  So by the middle 1920s, von Seeckt commanded the finest fighting unit in the world, and given the opportunity, could double its strength in a matter of days. All that was needed for a thorough recrudescence of German military power, was a Government prepared to subsidize the social clubs to such an extent that every member could devote himself to each particular ‘sport’ all day and every day without the need otherwise to earn a living, or – preferably – a Government strong enough to repudiate openly and with powerfully backed defiance, all limitations imposed on Germany at the Peace Conference.

  But where was such a Government to come from? Certainly not from any of the liberal or pseudo-liberal parties which floundered in the morass of German politics in the days of the Weimar Republic. Only the Communist Party seemed to possess the necessary ruthlessness both to need an army and to fly in the face of world opinion in order to possess one, and von Seeckt and his Army would have voluntarily disbanded rather than serve them or associate in any way with the Bolshevik rabble in Moscow.