by Norman Stone
But there was an immediate outcry, the more so as important interests had not been consulted. All of Sukhomlinov’s enemies in the army and the Duma united to save the fortresses; and the Grand Duke’s men in the Warsaw and Kiev military districts were also mobilised to denounce the plan, which they would have to execute. Some people, among them Stogov, of the General Staff, thought that the French would certainly be defeated within three months. Russia would then have to fight Germany alone, and she might do better, in the early period, to knock out Austria-Hungary and thus secure a free hand for the later Russo-German war. Austria-Hungary’s ‘multifarious army would not survive the blow’ since ‘it is to be assumed that, if Russia wins, the Slavs will gravitate towards her’.22 Moreover, the East Prussian offensive, launched by four armies, would always suffer from a weak flank to the south, and a rapid Austro-Hungarian thrust could penetrate this flank and disrupt progress in East Prussia. ‘Studies’ of this possibility displayed that Austro-Hungarian troops could reach far into Volhynia by the twentieth day of mobilisation, and could capture even Brest-Litovsk not long afterwards. These notions, though sometimes reciprocated in the Austro-Hungarian General Staff, were pure fantasy. By the twentieth day of mobilisation, the Austro-Hungarian armies were still a long way south of their own border, and although there was an Austro-Hungarian cavalry raid on the fifteenth day, it had difficulty penetrating the cordon of gendarmerie. Just the same, Klyuev in Warsaw and Alexeyev in Kiev mobilised General Staff opinion against Danilov. Conferences of the chiefs of staff of the military districts were held, and demands were raised for a re-shaping of the plan, to allow for action against Austria-Hungary. In the meantime political events had produced Austro-Russian, rather than Russo-German, crises, and the planners now felt that they should cater for an Austro-Russian war. Accordingly, in May 1912, Plan No. 19 ‘altered’ came into existence. In theory, there were two variants: Plan G, for the case that Germany attacked Russia, and Plan A, for the case that Germany attacked France. Only the latter one was real, as everyone knew. It provided for a concentration of Russian troops not against Germany, but against Austria-Hungary. Twenty-nine and a half infantry divisions were left for the German front, forty-six and a half for the Austro-Hungarian, and, in the event, rather more. Danilov’s East Prussian offensive was retained, but, missing two of the armies meant for it, was bound to be weaker than was safe. The fortresses were also kept up, and thenceforth planning and fortresses kept each other pinioned in a deadly embrace.
Faulty planning had much more to do with the initial Russian disasters than material weakness, or the supposed unreadiness of 1914. A compromise had been established between Danilov’s ideas and Alexeyev’s, and neither East Prussia nor Galicia really received enough strength. The counter-part of the quarrel, in England, of ‘westerners’ and ‘easterners’ was, in Russia, between ‘northerners’ and ‘southerners’. These latter represented the traditional cause, of Pan-Slavism, Constantinople, the Balkans, whereas Sukhomlinov’s men appreciated that the real danger, now, was Germany, and that it would be grotesque for Russia to begin a European war with an offensive against an enemy that did not matter very much. The weight of pre-war investment in fortresses—and of course in planning too, for the making of a plan was an arduous affair, not to be repeated too often—naturally swung things towards the traditionalists; and the political crisis of 1912–13 confirmed the trend. The whole planning-machine ceased to act on the logic of the situation, but became a kind of delayed-action seismograph, recording the diplomatic tremors of months before. By 1912, the Russian army was already fatally split between the northern operation and the southern one. Links between them were tenuous. In recognition of this, two separate army group commands, the ‘fronts’, were to be established in wartime. This was not an appreciation that affairs of command had become so complex that not only army commands, but also army group ones, were needed to administer the land forces; it was rather a perception that the army had to be divided between irreconcilable tasks. The construction of these separate groups was, as events were to show, an almost insuperable hindrance to the evolution of coherent strategy. It was not Danilov’s plan that illustrated the weakness of the Russian army’s command structure, but rather the upsetting of his plan.
With the ‘Great Programme’, deliberated throughout 1913 and becoming law in June 1914, the Russian army ostensibly became a European super-power, in conformity with the economic growth that Russia had experienced since 1906. The annual recruit-contingent was raised to 585,000,, for three-year service, such that the peacetime army alone would reach almost two million men—three times as large as Germany’s. Infantry divisions would rise to 122½ (from 114½), to Germany’s 96, and there would be 8,358 field guns to Germany’s 6,004. Each division would have twelve howitzers in place of six (fifty-two German regular divisions had eighteen), and would have four heavy field guns to the German regular division’s eight. Six-gun batteries would also, at last, be introduced, and the artillery was to have an extra 5,000 officers and 30,000 men.23 Railway-improvements were also proposed, to help with mobilisation. But beneath this weight, there was not much muscle. The Tsarist régime could profit, outwardly, from economic progress; but the structure of the army, if anything, suffered from economic progress, which left so much money available for the wrong choices that so many of the army’s functionaries unerringly made. There were now guns, railways, trained men in plenty. But commanders neglected their reserve-divisions, preferred to place guns in fortresses, and set up a plan for war that did not exploit strategic railways particularly; besides, the continuing belief in cavalry’s efficacy meant that railways that might have sent infantrymen speedily to the front were loaded, instead, with horses and fodder for them. The sacrifice of locomotives to horses was a suitable way for this army to enter the war in 1914.
CHAPTER TWO
The Military Imperative, July 1914
Russian preparations for war alarmed the Germans more and more, and news of the ‘Great Programme’ deprived them of their senses. It was the last straw in an atmosphere of unprecedented international tension. Berlin felt itself to be encircled by powerful and unscrupulous enemies. In France, there had been a ‘national re-awakening’, which produced the nationalist Poincaré as President, and a new army law re-introducing three-year military service. The British, far from being frightened out of hostility to a Germany possessed of a large battle-fleet, were also unmistakably likely to join battle against Germany in a European war. True, some German statesmen hoped otherwise. But German soldiers had no illusions, and their plans allowed for the landing of a British expeditionary force in France.1 Italy, too, had changed from warm alliance to open unreliability; and in 1913, Balkan conditions caused a similar change in the attitude of Romania. In such a situation, the Russian threat to Germany seemed more dangerous than anything else, and German statesmen began to foresee a day when Russian troops, in the name of Pan-Slavism, caused a destruction of the Habsburg Monarchy, and the creation of a Russian empire reaching as far as Stettin and Trieste. Moltke, chief of the German General Staff, wrote in February 1914 that ‘Russia’s preparedness for war has made gigantic progress since the Russo-Japanese war, and is now much greater than ever in the past’.2
In Europe at the time, there were widespread ideas that the German army was the most powerful in Europe, a vast war-machine of unconquerable strength. It was certainly a machine of considerable efficiency, as the campaigns of 1914–18 were to show. But it was not nearly as strong as foreigners feared, and as the Kaiser suggested. On the contrary, German generals felt very weak when they contemplated the forces of other generals.3 The army had fewer battalions than the French army (1,191 to 1,210), and in 1914 fewer guns than the Russian army (6,004 to 6,700), to the 1,876 battalions of which it was also, of course, inferior. It was also inferior to the French army in technical equipment of many kinds—lorries and cars for one.
The Germans were incontestably superior to their enemies only in one area�
��high-trajectory artillery—and even here their superiority was much over-rated.4 They had appreciated before their enemies that this type of artillery, with a high-explosive rather than shrapnel munition, would be of importance in the war to come. A field-cannon, which still made up the overwhelming majority of every army’s guns, fired fast, far and straight; it could be used to break up mass infantry-attacks. High-trajectory weapons were slower, and their range was less. But they could reach behind enemy fortifications, such as earth-parapets, that were inaccessible to field-cannon. The war to come would, of course, be a war in which field-fortification played a preponderant part, and the Germans were first off the mark in developing field-mortars—their regular divisions had eighteen such weapons to fifty-four field-cannon, whereas the Russian army, in 1914, had only six per division (and forty-eight field-cannon). Plans to counter this were made by the French and Russians, but the Germans went ahead to equip their reserve-divisions as well with field-mortars. Moreover, in heavy field artillery, the Germans acquired some superiority. The schwere Artillerie des Feldheeres in 1914 contained 575 heavy guns, cannon and howitzers, whereas the French army had 180, the Russian army 240. Borrowings from the Austrians of 300 mm. howitzers gave the Germans a greater margin of superiority. But neither advantage was very great. The ‘monster artillery’ with which the Germans are thought to have ‘shattered’ their way through Belgium was a legend. They possessed in all, for instance, only three 420 mm. Krupp heavy cannon, although, as the war progressed, many more of these were produced. There was certainly no reason, in German field-mortars or heavy artillery, for Moltke to forget his fears, especially when he recognised other armies’ intention to close the gap.
In any case, the German superiority in both areas came not from supposedly unconquerable industrial might, but from the accident of the campaigns, that Germany would have some besieging to do, and the other Powers would not. The German plan involved attack on French and Belgian fortresses, whereas in French and Russian plans, besieging fortresses played almost no rôle at all. The artillery of the two sides simply reflected this difference. A further accident came to Germany’s aid: she had a greater proportion of her army’s resources free for development of artillery than the other Powers had.5 This happened for reasons that, far from contenting German generals, frightened most of them out of their wits. In any army, the mere supply, transport, administration of hundreds of thousands of men came by a long way first in the army expense-sheets. In the Russian army of 1913–14, though no doubt it was an extreme case, ‘intendantstvo’—food, fodder, clothing—took 450 millions out of 580.6 But there were strict limits, for reasons to be explained below, to the number of conscripts that the German army was allowed to take in in any year: generally, 250,000, to the Russian army’s 450,000 (and in 1914, 585,000), whereas the armies’ budgets were roughly equal. The financial resources freed by the restriction of recruiting could be passed to artillery and technical services, and could of course also be used to maintain a higher proportion of long-serving soldiers and N.C.O.s, as distinct from conscripts, than was true of other armies. All in all, German artillery owed its superiority to accidents, sometimes unwelcome to the generals, and not to a mighty industrial machine.
The factor that most worried German generals in the period 1912-1914 was the restriction on recruiting.7 Although Prussia had been a pioneer of universal military service, her successors had let the practice lapse, although the principle still held good. The army authorities were not allowed to take in more men, in a year, than the Reichstag would allow them; and the Reichstag was not very accommodating. The mass-parties—socialists and clericals—were overtly hostile to an army that they regarded as an upper-class preserve, and a constant menace to mass-parties. Even the middle-classes, though they might frequently give their souls to the army, were reluctant to give it their money as well. In any case, less obvious factors counted against significant increase of recruit-contingents. The German navy was first of these. It demanded a growing share of the defence-budget, and left no room for expansion of the army’s expenses on supply. In the Tirpitz years, the German recruit-contingent barely expanded at all, although the population rose by ten million, and although there was now much less emigration than before. But the army leaders themselves sometimes feared mass-conscription. It would mean extending the officers’ corps, to cater for the large numbers of men to be taken in; and extension of the officers’ corps could only mean including elements that traditional minded Prussians, fighting the class-war, did not think suitable. Reserve-officers who were men from nowhere, perhaps even Jews, would not combat ‘the social peril’ as effectively as a homogeneously Junker officers’ corps. The Prussian War Ministry, in the years before 1914, itself offered stout resistance to any application of real universal conscription. Consequently, the military burden on the German people was inferior to that laid on the French people, whose military leaders suffered from few such inhibitions, who, indeed, were concerned to extract the last ounce of military potential from the French people so as to counter-act the faster-growing German population. In Germany, liability to service ended at forty-five; in France, at forty-eight. In Germany, not fifty per cent of the liable young men were conscripted and trained; in France, eighty-five per cent—that is, all but the physically disabled. In 1914, there were five million Germans trained for war, and of military age, and five million untrained. In France, there were five million trained, and one million untrained; and the French army in the west, together with small Belgian and British contingents, actually contained more men than the German army, although the difference in population, especially near the younger end, was considerable—there were almost two young Germans to a young Frenchman. The French army of 1914 represented a tenth of the French population, the German army one-twentieth of the German population. Certainly, a change was rail-roaded through the Reichstag in 1913, but since it was followed by the Russian ‘Great Programme’, its effects were not great. It was not surprising that the German military urged war before it was too late, for, with the military law of 1913, and the cumbersome wealth-tax that had paid for it, they thought that they had reached the limit of their resources: better war with Russia than with the Reichstag.
This calculation was given a further support by news of Russian strategic railway-construction.8 The German war-plan had been more or less forced by the facts of the situation, in which Russia and France were allied against Germany. The German army contained ninety-six divisions—fifty-two first-line, with eighty guns each, twenty-five second-line, with thirty-six guns each, and the equivalent of nineteen third-line, with at best twenty-four guns each. The French army contained forty-six first-line and thirty-seven second-line divisions, with, on average, forty guns each. The Russian army had 114½ divisions, with fifty-four guns each or, if army heavy artillery is included, fifty-six or fifty-seven. Once the Russian army had been mobilised, Germany would stand little chance of winning. Her only chance was to knock out France before the Russian army had begun its march to the west; then she could, at leisure, turn about to face Russia. Count Schlieffen had arranged for this: seven-eighths of the German army to proceed against France, via Belgium, in the first week of war. It was not thought that any other plan offered Germany the chance of success. Defensive action on the two fronts could only lead to a long throttling of Germany.
An essential part of the Schlieffen Plan was therefore the calculation that Russian mobilisation would be slow. This was true enough in the 1890s and 1900s. Not even 200 trains could move daily to the western borders, against the 650 that Germany could pass over the Cologne bridges alone; and there would be problems in transferring rolling-stock from Central Russia to the western border on mobilisation. The want of, rolling-stock and railway-mileage was complemented by a multitude of technical problems, as Russian railways were built cheaply, without that wealth of equipment that western railways had—signal-boxes at frequent intervals, watering and coaling capacity, skilled technicians in plenty. In cons
equence, Russian planning itself developed with extreme caution as its guiding-light—troops drawn up in lumps, far from the German border, and large, defensive installations being erected. It would take these forces at least six weeks to be ready for action, and even then they would be unable to move fast. Schlieffen felt that the dozen divisions, many of them second- or third-line, that he proposed to leave for the defence of East Prussia would suffice in the first six weeks or so, while the rest defeated France. It was an opinion that many Russian soldiers shared.
The rise of Russian strategic railways struck this entire edifice at its base. Commercial development alone required increases in Russian rolling-stock and railway-mileage which, in 1914, was greater than Germany’s. The Germans could make 250,000 railway-waggons free for mobilisation; the Russians, now, 214,000. By 1910, Russian mobilisation could proceed at the rate of 250 trains per day; by 1914, 360; while by 1917, Danilov planned to have 560 trains rolling to the west every day. In August 1914, Russia mobilised under the prescriptions of the old plan, No. 19 ‘altered’ dating from the period 1910–12. Mobilisation took thirty days for the 744 battalions and 621 cavalry squadrons involved, but was over for two-thirds of them by the eighteenth day of mobilisation. With Plan No. 20, due to take effect in September 1914, and still more with Plan No. 21, to take effect in 1917, mobilisation was to be completely over by the eighteenth day—only three days later than the termination of German mobilisation in the west. Meanwhile, from 1912 onwards, there was a series of preparatory measures. Two-fifths of the army was permanently stationed in Poland, thus reducing the railways’ carrying-task. A legal ‘period of preparation for war’ was introduced in February 1912, permitting measures of preparation, in advance of formal mobilisation, at the discretion of the war ministry—for instance, call-up of the three youngest classes of the reserve in areas threatened by enemy action (e.g. Poland west of the Vistula). These measures, put into effect from 26th July onwards, allowed Germans to suggest that Russia had ‘secretly mobilised’, although in reality the Germans were told what was going on. Finally, to offset the period when a new intake of conscripts would be at their least ready—the first six months of their service—the oldest class was to be kept under arms for a further half-year, such that in the winter, the Russian army would even in peacetime have two million men, as much as the German war-time army. In 1913–14, further measures of strategic railway-building were announced. The French government would guarantee railway-loans placed in France, of 500 million francs per annum, and French generals made suggestions as to the lines Russia should construct or double-track, so as to make her mobilisation quicker; French pressure even led to a Russian project, given some effect in 1914, for the assembly of an invasion-force in Poland west of the Vistula, an area hitherto judged too vulnerable to be occupied, and therefore left empty of railways. In the ‘Great Programme’ of 1914-17, nearly 150 million roubles, out of 700 millions ear-marked for military purposes, were to go on strategic railways. The Germans were already alarmed that Russian mobilisation had speeded up as much as it had. By 1917, they recognised, it would be almost as fast as their own. Russians would be in Berlin before Germans were in Paris.