by John Mosier
The problem is that the mountain passes that run from Lorraine into Alsace also go from Alsace into Lorraine. In the event of a future war, the Germans would have precisely the same difficulty in attacking the French as would have existed the other way around.
The amateur strategist may sneer at the obviousness of this deduction, but, as von Moltke famously remarked, strategy is basically common sense—a quality notoriously lacking in theorists as well as sometimes in amateurs.6 Indeed, as we shall see, one sadly visible strand that runs through the Anglo-French direction of the war is the triumph of abstruse theory over von Moltke’s notion of common sense.
So Bismarck had saddled von Moltke and his successors with a pretty problem. The great battles of annihilation that had characterized 1870 had all been fought within spitting distance of the frontier. Wissembourg, where the first major battle had been fought, was in fact a frontier town. So was Sarreguemines. Wörth, Froeschwiller, Spicheren had all been won by German armies that were just across the frontier, and had short and uninterrupted lines of supply.
But the battles to the west of Metz—Saint Privat, Gravelotte, Mars-la-Tour—had been stiffer affairs, and the final engagements, fought to the south and northwest of Paris, had been even worse.
Von Moltke, no more than any other sensible commander, disliked the idea of fighting a major battle hundreds of kilometers from his home country. You might win at first, but finally, you’d end up in the same predicament as Hannibal—and that was if you won. If you lost, well, the lamentations of several Roman emperors were eloquent proof of the problematic nature of battles fought deep in enemy territory.
But in effect, Bismarck’s new frontier had guaranteed that in the event of a future war with France, the only easy route for a German offensive would be along the roughly 50-kilometer frontier between Metz and Luxembourg. Geography therefore precluded both surprise and the double-envelopment offensive that von Moltke’s students were dutifully made to learn.
Now, it’s distinctly possible that Bismarck knew what he was doing, that he wanted peace, and thought this was the way to ensure it. This is, after all, the man who observed contemptuously that all the colonies were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian musketeer, and that, “Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”7
But not even A. J. P. Taylor could rehabilitate Bismarck, given the Church of Germanophobia, which sees him as being simply a wicked and evil predecessor of Adolf Hitler. However, it’s worth noting that Bismarck’s peace lasted for forty years, and that it took the combined efforts of a whole phalanx of European statesmen—most of whom preened themselves on being vastly superior to the grouchy Prussian Junkers—to overturn it. Again, Taylor’s sarcastic summary gets right to the point. “Most statesmen seek to show that they have acted from high-minded motives, but have failed to live up to them. They do not plan wars; they drift into war and think it an adequate excuse to plead that this was unintentional. . . . Bismarck’s planned wars killed thousands; the just wars of the twentieth century have killed millions” (79).
Whatever von Moltke thought, in the 1870s the German army devoted most of its efforts to internal improvements and the construction of fortifications designed to keep the French out.
Metz, already in a commanding position overlooking the Moselle and the Woëvre, was girdled with forts. Another set of forts guarded the main passes through the Vosges that led to Strasbourg. In the Vosges itself, building an actual fort was unnecessary, but the Germans constructed some very formidable defensive positions in key places, most notably at the key positions of the Lingekopf and the Hartmannswillerkopf.
THE CHALLENGE
The idea of planning offensive operations is inherent in the mind of the professional staff officer, or anyway the German ones who were raised in the traditions of von Moltke the Elder, and the very difficulty of coming up with a workable solution made the idea only all the more attractive. Not that there’s any reason to restrict this line of thought to the Germans. Their opposite numbers in France and Austria and Russia all had similar hobbies, and before we dismiss them as warmongering militarists, perhaps we should remember the hoary Roman adage that the best way to ensure peace is to prepare for war. That is what professional soldiers are supposed to be doing.
But professionals have genuine differences of opinion, and peacetime armies have the luxury of entertaining them without any real resolution. The French, with their usual knack for nomenclature, termed these divisions chapels. Not a bad way to get at the true nature of the divisions, as they were held with religious conviction.
As we shall see in our accounts of the war itself, the chapels in the French military were responsible for a great deal of mischief, not to mention the slaughter of a good many French soldiers.
The Germans were hardly immune to this disorder, the chief difference being that instead of half a dozen different groups, there were basically only two of any importance. One group, looking at what Bismarck had done, and what the French were likely to do (and capable of doing), decided that in the event of a two-front war—the most likely possibility—the best solution was to stand on the defensive in the west, and mount offensive operations in the east.
For want of a better word, we can call these people the Easterners, and those who felt the other way, the Westerners. As everyone knows, when the war began, the German army went on the offensive in the west, but the Easterners by and large still felt they were right, and when the war in the west degenerated into the stalemate of the trenches, they took that as confirmation of the rightness of their views. So the war, far from settling the debate, only exacerbated it.
As we shall see, this internal division had serious repercussions for Verdun. As with the French chapels, it sometimes appears that on both sides the adherents of the opposing ideas were more interested in proving they were correct than in defeating a common enemy. Of course, every war sees the emergence of differing views about the best way to win it (or how not to lose it), but it would appear that in this particular war the divisions ran much deeper, and had much more serious repercussions than in others.
Certainly more so than in previous conflicts, one of the more important reasons being that this was the first major conflict of any duration—and almost the first conflict, period—in which the functions of the general staff were being exercised by all the combatants. Although it is generally agreed that this phenomenon, which began with the Prussians, transformed the nature of warfare, organizationally speaking, what is often left unsaid is the extent to which it created what we might think of as a professorial military class.
That is, professional officers who, not being burdened with having actual command responsibilities, were free to speculate, to dictate—and to interfere. That freedom naturally encouraged them to think abstractly, was the natural concomitant not only of the rise of the staff as an institution, but an integral part of the increasing acceptance of a good education being the sine qua non for a successful officer. Educated men and women are always intrigued by theory.
Although, like the emergence of the chapels (the logical outgrowth of the emphasis on education and the rise of the general staff), theory would play an important role in shaping the way the war was fought; it also explains the basic, underlying attraction of an offensive in the west.
In a word, the notion had a much greater intellectual fascination, simply because it was so challenging. A plan of offensive operations in the east was simple to the point of being tiresome—for Russia and Austria-Hungary as well as Germany. The open spaces meant a war of maneuver, or, to be candid, a classic war in which you went out into the field and engaged your opponent in a great battle à la Borodino, Austerlitz, or Waterloo. It was a test of courage, of steadfastness, of discipline—of all the traditional military virtues.
THE WALL AND THE FORT
But a future war in t
he west was an entirely different matter. Before 1871, the projected, or anticipated, theater of operations in a Franco-German war was the relatively small area that stretched from Wissembourg (and the Rhine) over to Luxembourg, about 100 kilometers. Not only was there not much uncertainty as to where the enemy would attack, but a defending army would be able to move easily to counter any thrust. In consequence, the combatants knew where to move to engage their opponent. There were no negative consequences for being out of position. In August 1870, the French knew the Prussians were going to come across the border at Wissembourg and Sarreguemines and were ready to engage them.
The Bismarck border meant that in the event of war, both sides would be dealing with a landlocked border of over 300 kilometers. Possible areas of attack were spread out from one end to the other. Guess wrong about your opponent’s intentions, and he’d be deep inside your country before you could relocate your forces and engage him in battle.
Historically, the solution to this problem had been to construct walls and forts, the exact mix depending on the geography. There once was an idea that gunpowder meant the end of masonry, that cannons meant castles were no longer relevant. Not so; time and time again the armies of the Thirty Years’ War found themselves frustrated by ordinary city walls built many years earlier: La Rochelle, Stralsund, Magdeburg, Dunkirk—a very long list. Artillery simply changed the architecture; the concept remained the same.
In one way, however, there was a conceptual shift. Artillery meant that the wall, instead of being literal, as was the case with the Romans, the Chinese, and the Danes, could be what might be thought of as virtual: a barrier created by the field of fire directed by the guns mounted in forts. Properly sited, taking advantage of the terrain, forts could be used to prevent invasions, block potential avenues of attack. At the very least, they would delay the attacks, allowing the defense time to move its armies to the threatened areas.
Nowadays, in the age of airpower, this last point is overlooked, but right up through the end of the Second World War, properly built fortifications were almost completely invulnerable to aerial attacks. In May 1940 German bombers were unable to do any damage whatsoever to the French fort of Schoenenbourg in northeastern Alsace, and in fall 1944 the Franco-German fortifications at Metz proved equally resistant to Patton’s attacking units.8
So the idea of blocking potential invasion routes with fortifications that would hold out long enough to allow the defenders to deploy their armies was a perfectly sound idea. Ideally, the defenses might be so formidable that the invasion route was abandoned entirely, thus channeling lines of advance into predictable areas. Given the length of the new border, this idea had a particular appeal to both sides.
Now this brief explanation may seem gratuitous, but over the years there has been a great deal of nonsense written about fortifications, the abysmally misunderstood Maginot Line being the prime exhibit in this regard. Historians have gone off on highly entertaining disquisitions about the Maginot Line mentality this revealed in France, about the uselessness of the whole project, about in fact almost everything under the sun except what actually happened.
The misunderstanding of the concept, the genuine ignorance of how it actually worked in the Second World War, thus leads to ideas about the previous war that take us even farther from reality. As a result, the reader is inclined to throw in the intellectual towel at the mere mention of fortifications and defensive lines. But as we shall see, when armed and garrisoned by determined men, even the oldest and most vulnerable forts were more than a match for their attackers.
Instead of reading the past from some refracted vision of the present, it is more profitable to consider the actual problem the French and the Germans faced, and how they attempted to deal with it. An understanding of the specific problem the French army faced after 1871 allows us to see the logic of the initial decisions they made, and then, as the decades passed, to see how they strayed from their own logic.
Their experiences in 1870 had given them—temporarily, as it turned out—a certain healthy dose of realism. First and foremost was the enormous difficulty France faced in mobilizing its army and getting it into the presumed theater of war. The 1870 conflict brought this home with a vengeance, as it was in great measure Europe’s first railroad war. The armies of Richelieu, Louis XIV, and Napoleon I had walked toward the frontier, but then so had their adversaries. War was in some respects a leisurely affair, and the armies in those days were smaller.
It is sometimes forgotten that although it was France who declared war on Prussia, the reason von Moltke’s armies moved across the border first was because the Germans had mobilized more quickly, in large measure owing to their advanced rail network.
So the French rather belatedly realized that Germany had a great advantage when it came to mobilization. Not only did they have a better rail network, but they had a smaller and more densely populated country. France was, at that time, the largest country in Europe proper, with a population scattered to the edges of its borders, and with a rugged terrain that made the sort of rail network the Germans had well-nigh impossible.
There was no way they could ever hope to match Germany’s speed in mobilization: geography was against them. At the same time, the new and revolutionary way in which the European armies were assembled for war gave an enormous advantage to the side that was ready to go into action first.
This revolution in military affairs might more properly be called an evolution; whichever term we use, it denotes a new approach to manpower, beginning with the idea that in theory, every able-bodied male would either complete a fixed term of service in the army or would be currently serving in it.
In France this was particularly true, as a good 80 percent of the male eligibles had done their service. But as no country could afford to maintain a standing army comprising even a significant minority of the male population, each army consisted of three components.
There was a core of what we might term professional soldiers, enlisted men, officers, and noncommissioned officers, who formed the cadres of each unit. Then there was a much larger group, consisting of those men currently doing their military service. Each year a portion of them left, were replaced by a new cohort. So in the French army, the regular units were all maintained at some fraction of their wartime strength. Mobilization meant that their numbers would be completed by adding men who had recently completed their military obligation.
It should be said in passing that this rather basic fact is often not fully understood by military historians. With the exception of certain elite units, the European armies of 1914 were composed of a majority of men who had been recalled from their civilian life, as the general proportion of these units was about one currently enlisted soldier to two recalled ones. There were very few units that went into action in August 1914 composed of what in the American army of 1840 or 1860 would have been called “regulars.”
The only appreciable difference was a function of how recently the men recalled had completed their service. The so-called “reserve” divisions were simply topped off with men who had last been in uniform six or ten years before. In this way the combatants hoped to move from a peacetime army of roughly a million men, to a wartime army of four or five million.
Clearly the mere act of mobilization would be an enormous logistical task, and the stakes would be high. There was no way the French could match the Germans at this game. The basic geography and demography of France was against them. No matter how good they were at the process, they’d never be able to beat the Germans at mobilization. Making the problem even worse was that Germany could put more men into the field than France could, simply because they had a larger population.
Size was not the only hindrance. The rail system, such as it was, went from the provinces to Paris, hardly beneficial if you wanted to mobilize troops from the west and south and get them to the northeast.
There was another factor that compli
cated French troop deployments considerably. The German and Austro-Hungarian armies were all concentrated inside their respective national borders. In consequence, their professional core was distributed more or less evenly among the units of their armies, with the best units adjacent to their frontiers.
But France, like Great Britain, was a colonial power. Moreover, its most important possessions had come into its grasp very late. In consequence, the French maintained significant forces abroad, most of them in North Africa. British troops were scattered all over the globe, but then Great Britain, an island power with a formidable navy, didn’t have to worry about being invaded by its neighbors. And by continental standards, the British army was insignificant. The French forces in North Africa alone were about the same size as the entire British army.
The nature of these forces has always been poorly understood, largely owing to the name. The single largest block was the infanterie coloniale, a name that suggests native troops. France certainly had army units composed of men from its African and Asian colonies, but the infanterie coloniale was composed of Frenchmen, just as the Legion étrangère was composed of Europeans of various nationalities.
Basically the infanterie coloniale was the equivalent of the marines in the United States: elite units maintained at closer to their establishment strength, since they actually saw combat. Any sensible general would want them in the forefront of his army in the event of a European war, but getting them into position to repel an invasion would take time. In that sense France’s colonial empire worked against it, just as did Great Britain’s.
In fact, one of the difficulties the French faced in a future war was the high percentage of their experienced soldiers who had been culled out and were in these elite units. Every army has that problem, even today. One school argues that it’s better to distribute the more experienced and able soldiers all through the army, and that elite units dilute that, deprive the regular units of responsible leaders. The other school argues that these elite units have a combat capability out of all proportion to their numbers. In most armies there is generally a compromise, with only a small number of elite units.