Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  A good description of how decent individuals could become killers under wartime conditions has been left by Wilhelm Schweiger, a thirty-year-old rifleman serving in Reserve Jäger Bataillon Nr. 7, formed in the town of Bückeburg, north-western Germany. Schweiger, from his writing, seems to have been a gentle man, keen to get on with the soldiers around him, shocked by war’s destruction but determined to do his bit to save the Fatherland. He was clearly very much in love with his fiancée, Erna, for whom he wrote a diary detailing his short service. He was killed in France on 20 September 1914. Schweiger’s unit crossed into Belgium on 15 August, and on the morning of 17 August arrived at Liège, a day after its last fort had capitulated. Schweiger’s diary had at first expressed understanding rather than enmity towards the Belgian population. However, after they entered Liège, he and his comrades were told that their sister battalion, the active Jäger Bataillon Nr. 7, which had been part of the initial assault on the city, had been treacherously attacked by the population. The troops were ordered to search the houses, find food and billets, and, as Schweiger’s diary explains, ‘simply throw the residents onto the street. Anyone, whether man, woman or child, who in any way resisted should without more ado be shot.’89

  Living alongside a population said to have wiped out half of a battalion was inevitably going to be tense, and the men’s anxiety increased when, on their first night in Liège, an infantryman on watch was shot. Two nights later, Schweiger himself came under what he believed to be franc-tireur fire. His unit had posted sentries around the town, and he and ten other men were escorting their Second Lieutenant back to his quarters. They were walking down a quiet leafy street when suddenly from behind them three shots rang out. The German soldiers scrambled behind the trees and began to return fire. Schweiger was certain that he saw the muzzle flash of rifles from the second storey of houses fifty metres away, and he and his comrades shot frantically at the windows and then charged. They battered down one of the front doors and were ordered by an infantry colonel, who along with some General Staff officers had been attracted to the scene by the heavy firing, ‘immediately to set the house alight and to shoot any living being who came out’. The command, wrote Schweiger, ‘had to be carried out and was carried out’:

  The rage among us riflemen, who had been so treacherously shot at, was boundless. To my great relief and joy, however, the people fleeing from the neighbouring houses, and women and children, got away without being shot. A Bückeburger rifleman cannot shoot women and children, thank God! Still, it was terrible, quite terrible. That is war in all its horror.

  Schweiger did not say how many men he and his comrades executed that night. Significantly, he also did not mention finding any weapons; his diary dwells only on the fine furniture that the soldiers found in the house, which they first dowsed with petrol and then set alight. Whether Schweiger later had doubts about the source of the firing is impossible to know, but his conscience was clearly troubled. That night, although exhausted, he could not sleep. ‘The excitement, the awful impressions weighed too heavily on us,’ he explained. ‘I only did my duty and obeyed orders, but it is dreadful. If only this horrible war were at an end.’90

  The harshness of the orders that Schweiger received from his officers is perhaps the most striking aspect of his account. Commanders’ decisions were highly influential in determining the level of violence. They were shaped by the German army’s own culture, which ruthlessly prioritized ‘military necessity’ and was characterized by deep scepticism towards international law.91 The officer corps had been traumatized by its experience in 1870–71, when French francs tireurs had perverted a miraculously rapid military victory into a gruelling and bloody purgatory. Its conservative leadership was deeply concerned that civilians should not intervene in 1914, for embroiled in a two-front war against materially superior enemies it could afford neither the time nor the troops for a prolonged pacification operation. The force’s abhorrence of irregular fighters was motivated by an old-fashioned humanitarianism, as well as pragmatic self-interest. German officers agreed that one could do no more for humanity than to keep fighting as brief as necessary. To this end, participation should be limited to the professionals. Irregular combatants were seen as an abomination, for they fought covertly, and thus without honour, and increased bloodshed without offering a realistic chance of victory. In meetings convened to draw up international laws of war, German representatives, supported by the Russians and opposed vociferously by the Belgians and the western Entente, had fought largely successfully to restrict civilians’ right of resistance. The 1907 Hague Convention all but banned guerrilla warfare. Civilians were permitted to rise up spontaneously only if not already under occupation and, a clause totally at odds with the reality of twentieth-century combat, ‘if they carry arms openly’.92

  The focus of German commanders in planning and fighting the 1914 campaign was on annihilating the enemy’s army, not the population.93 The first impetus for repression came from below, from combatants like Schweiger who honestly but erroneously believed themselves to be under attack by Belgian civilians.94 Commanders, drawing on the experience of suppressing francs tireurs in 1870–71 and the precepts of ‘military necessity’, quickly legitimized and expanded their men’s violent and often panicked response. Under international law, they were entirely within their rights to try and execute any civilian found bearing arms illegally.95 The repression they instituted, however, went well beyond all legal limits. First, suspected francs tireurs were usually summarily shot, not tried. Second, higher commands, including corps and army commanders, ordered mass reprisals; a practice specifically forbidden by the Hague Convention.96 General von Einem, for example, told his troops as early as 8 August that villages where ambushes had taken place should be burned and all inhabitants shot. Mass arrests were also carried out. Some 10,000 French and 13,000 Belgian civilians, including women and children, were deported to Germany. Fines too were levied on communities accused of resistance. These measures were intended to instil in the Belgian population what the Commander of 10th Division, Major General Kosch, called a ‘healthy terror’.97 They were supported by pre-emptive actions such as hostage-taking, arms searches and the posting of placards warning inhabitants of the dire penalties of resistance. Moltke himself, albeit very late, on 27 August, advocated ‘energetic’ deterrence.98

  The draconian measures of German commanders against the illusory popular resistance were shocking and traumatic for the invasion zone’s inhabitants. Nearly 1.5 million Belgians fled their homes.99 However, it might well be asked why the repression was not much worse. Intense fear and belief in the franc-tireur attacks were ubiquitous among all ranks of the German army, yet the ensuing panic, reprisals and what the atrocities’ foremost experts have called a ‘deliberate strategy of deterrence by terror’ prompted this force of 2 million soldiers to kill just 6,427 civilians; less than 0.1 per cent of the 7.8 million inhabitants of the territory overrun in August and early September 1914.100 By historical standards too this was negligible; Napoleon’s troops fighting guerrillas in Spain just a century earlier had routinely torched villages and sacked towns, massacring whole communities. Recent attempts by historians to present the atrocities as a prelude or pointer to Nazi genocide and annihilation warfare in eastern Europe three decades later lack credibility, for these slaughtered millions and were driven principally by a racial ideology absent in the imperial army’s violence of 1914. Nor, as will be seen, were Germans’ delusions of civilian resistance unusual or their conduct outside other contemporary armies’ norms of violence; if anything, they were milder.101 Most astonishing is how abruptly the atrocities ceased. After a first wave during the Liège siege and in the south before 12 August, the major surge of killing took place in the week after the main invasion of Belgium began on 18 August. Thereafter, the violence plummeted and by the end of the first week of September, excepting a few outliers, it was ended (see Fig. 1). The troops’ discipline must generally have held, for the incidence o
f atrocities did not correlate with the force’s growing supply problems nor, unlike in other armies, did its retreat in the middle of that month inflame new bloodshed.102

  Commanders not only expanded the violence first perpetrated by their scared and angry soldiers but were even more crucial in restraining and quickly halting it. German officers, while placing the blame firmly on a ‘fanaticized’ enemy population, often expressed horror at the brutality of insurrectionary war.103 The corps’ aristocratic honour culture was a strong, if not fail-safe, brake on harsh reprisals: the massacre of civilians, especially women and children, and the destruction of towns sat poorly with the chivalrous self-image of professional officers. There were also sound military reasons to limit violence: any orgy of killing and arson, along with the pillage and rape that might accompany it, undermined troops’ discipline. Finally, doubts about the extent of the popular insurrection soon emerged, along with concern that arbitrary brutality might provoke even greater resistance. Major General Kosch, whose division had killed over 200 Belgian civilians and hundreds of wounded French soldiers between 21 and 24 August, provides an illustration of how these considerations rapidly converged to prompt at least partial reassessment and restraint. His tone was notably defensive when he wrote to his wife on 26 August: ‘We are not Huns and do not want to sully the honour of the German name.’ He insisted that ‘the bloody events in Belgium, where treacherous shooting came from every house, and even clergy and women took part, made necessary a merciless burning of villages and shooting of guilty inhabitants’. Nonetheless, with his soldiers now plundering and vandalizing the region, he was concerned about order. His unit’s departure from Belgian territory and entry into France offered a face-saving excuse to halt the violence. ‘The Frenchman,’ he argued, ‘is showing himself to be more peaceful and accommodating.’ Repression there was ‘stupidity, for we rob ourselves of the aid of the land, undermine discipline and provoke the population to a dreadful people’s war’.104

  Figure 1. The pattern of German military ‘atrocities’: Belgian and French civilians killed by the German army, August–October 1914 (incidents with ten or more civilian deaths only).

  Source: J. Horne and A. Kramer, German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, and London, 2001), Appendix I.

  The German army’s franc-tireur delusion had already passed its climax before hopes for a rapid victory over France were definitively thwarted in early September at the Battle of the Marne. The seeds of this battle were laid a fortnight before it opened, when Joffre had finally recognized the true path of the German advance. On 25 August he outlined a new strategy that envisaged a concentration of force at Amiens for an encirclement of his enemy’s right wing. Troops were rapidly moved north-west by rail to build a new Sixth Army, comprising nine infantry and two cavalry divisions, outside the German envelopment. An offensive by the German Sixth and Seventh Armies in the south failed even to pin down French strength, let alone break through the fortified front to achieve a double encirclement. Although Joffre’s Amiens attack was not launched because the British commander, Sir John French, considered his troops too exhausted to participate, growing Entente strength in the north offered other possibilities. By 6 September, the German First, Second and Third Armies, which on 23 August had outnumbered their enemies by 25½ against 17½ divisions, faced 41 divisions. The French had made a remarkable recovery since their early shattering defeats. Fifty-four incompetent commanders had been fired and brutal discipline, including summary execution, had been used to enforce order among demoralized troops. Over 100,000 men had been taken from depots to restore units to strength. Far from being beaten, as German leaders thought, by the start of September their opponent was more capable than ever of offensive action.105

  By contrast, the Germans’ operational situation worsened as they advanced. The first problem was command: Moltke, based first at Coblenz and then Luxembourg, was hundreds of kilometres from the battle and had only intermittent radio contact with the three armies on the right. This hindered his ability to coordinate them. Second, even as Entente forces swelled in the north, the strength of the German right wing was rapidly dissipating. Two corps were detached to guard against a sortie by the Belgian army from Antwerp and another was held outside the French fortress at Maubeuge. Moltke transferred two others from the Second Army on 25 August to assist defenders hard-pressed by the Russians in East Prussia. Only eleven corps continued to advance south-west through France. Third, the further these troops marched, the more difficult it became to keep them supplied. The 80 kilometres from a railway reckoned to be the outer limit at which early twentieth-century armies could operate effectively had been greatly exceeded: First Army was nearly 140 kilometres and Second Army 170 kilometres from their railheads on 4 September. The horse-drawn wagons tasked with taking supplies from the stations to the troops could not keep up with the advance and the army had only 4,000 motor lorries, of which three-fifths had broken down by the Battle of the Marne.106 While prodigious effort kept the troops supplied with ammunition, everything else ran short. Sergeant Major Baier, whose Grenadier Regiment 2 was at the head of First Army, complained on 30 August that his unit had no bread. The first soldiers to arrive at a village picked it bare, leaving those behind hungry. After covering 600 kilometres on foot with scant chance to bathe or change, the men, he wrote, ‘look the pits’. They and the units around them had also started to take heavy casualties. Baier had fought a fierce but phoney war against enemy stragglers and imaginary francs tireurs since crossing into Belgium on 14 August, but on 28 August he had his real baptism of fire in battle against French troops. The Germans won, capturing two gun batteries with munitions wagons, but the encounter cost Baier’s company a quarter of its strength.107

  Nonetheless, despite the hardships, all still appeared to be going well. On 29 August, Moltke had shifted the right and centre’s line of march from south-west to south, so that the whole force passed east of Paris. On 2 September he directed them as in his plan to push the French to the south-east. Yet at this moment, just as the German encirclement was starting to close, there was a failure of coordination. The First Army, which was on the edge of the right wing, now had to guard the flank against Paris, but it was a day’s march ahead of the neighbouring Second Army. The commander of First Army, General Alexander von Kluck, believed that if he pressed on he could take the rear of the French Fifth Army and destroy it. Instead of withdrawing and facing west, he pushed his men south over the Marne. Joffre grasped his chance. On 5 September the Sixth Army smashed eastwards north of the river into the single reserve corps that Kluck had left to protect his flank. In the following days, the German general was forced hurriedly to move two corps from his front to help fend off this assault 100 kilometres to the north, but in so doing he created a 40-kilometre gap between his army and Second Army. Entente forces in the south-east and south had gone on the offensive on 6 September, and the British Expeditionary Force marched into this gap, menacing the right and rear of the German Second Army. Its commander, General Karl von Bülow, pulled back his exposed right wing, widening the hole. Neither general informed the other of his actions, and Moltke only discovered through intelligence intercepts that the British were between his two armies. A staff officer was dispatched to find out what was happening and on 9 September, the fortieth day of mobilization and the point at which by German planning France should have been beaten, he told both armies to retreat. Moltke confirmed the order two days later.108

  The Germans never had much chance of completing their scheme once French forces moved north. Their troops were exhausted, their supply stretched to the limit, and the numbers arrayed against them too great. Baier, whose corps was one of those quickly sent north to help repel the French Sixth Army’s attack, described the fighting with horror. ‘I looked death in the eye a hundred times yesterday,’ he told his parents on 8 September. ‘We are lying opposite an enemy with superior artillery, whom it is impossible to approach as he simply shoots our
infantry to pieces.’109 The Marne battle was conceived and decided by manoeuvre, but the fighting itself pointed towards the static, artillery-dominated future. By mid-September, if figures collected by the Medical Officer of III/Infantry Regiment 52, a battalion in First Army, are typical, shellfire had caused three-quarters of the German infantry’s casualties.110 Baier’s experience of being trapped during the battle ‘in the most terrible artillery fire, against which we were powerless’ would characterize warfare on the Western Front. From 9 September the German army retreated 60 kilometres in good order, reaching new positions behind the river Aisne five days later. The armies dug trenches, stabilizing the front. Men too found ways of fortifying themselves for further struggle: ‘It is terrible how the nerves become dulled. One lies in battle as if in a dream, afterwards everything appears as if in a novel, not a reality. The groans of the wounded and the often horrible sight also hardly move one any longer. We live as if outside of reality.’111