While Napoleon may have revolutionized the manner of waging war, his troops were still dependent on living off the land. Although he did at times try to create massive magazines behind the front from which supplies were despatched, invariably the inadequate roads and lack of sufficient transport meant that they were never sufficient to supply his army. In a way, Napoleon straddles two types of war, pre- and post-railways. He made use of more sophisticated supply chains than had any previous military commander but he was still constrained by the inadequacy of transport facilities, which forced his troops to live off the land, limiting his ability to manoeuvre. Napoleon made mobility the key to success and, with simple tactics and brilliant strategies, he moved armies faster than anyone had before and punched harder than his enemies. At times, the Napoleonic Wars were railway wars without the railways. He even called his supply wagons ‘trains’: they consisted of dedicated lines of wagons bringing up supplies behind the army. However, this supply system was still only sustainable for short periods of time and over relatively modest distances.
Napoleon’s foolhardy incursion into Russia in 1812 demonstrates this perfectly. At first, Napoleon’s brilliant organizational skills enabled the ‘trains’ to supply his army of 650,000 men efficiently, but he was reliant on a quick victory because beyond a couple of hundred miles it was impossible to sustain the advance through supplies from the rear. His ‘trains’ were not expected to keep up with the front-line soldiers on their rapid 600-mile march through central Europe. This suggests that, from a purely logistical point of view, the invasion was never sustainable because there was not enough food and forage for the soldiers to live off the land. Napoleon relied on the richer farming country nearer Moscow to sustain his troops, but inevitably the advance foundered as the men suffered from heat exhaustion on the march eastwards and hunger as the local peasantry fled taking their supplies with them (and burning what they left behind, a scorched-earth policy later revived by Stalin in 1941). He had hoped for a campaign of just three weeks and once it was extended there was no hope of victory. Moscow was always an overambitious target; once the retreat was sounded, starvation in the arctic conditions was inevitable and about half of Napoleon’s army perished. The rapid retreat from the burnt-out Moscow illustrated the point that such a huge army had to be permanently on the move. The French army had been far better organized than its opposition, but the Russians triumphed partly because they had a shorter supply line which kept more of them alive, but also because they were used to the conditions and more motivated as they were on home territory fighting off an invader. The Russian tactics were to resist briefly then retreat, hoping the French would follow and overstretch themselves in the process, a strategy the Russians would repeat when repelling the German invasion in 1941.
The ability of armies to move – and, ironically, to stay put – changed in the nineteenth century as the advent of the industrial age not only revolutionized weaponry but also the transport system. The railways would change the equation between mobility and ability to access supplies, but it would take time for the military to understand how. Wars are not won or lost solely by weaponry or even the numbers of combatants on each side. It is the mundane aspects of military operations that are crucial, such as food, supplies and lines of communication.
There were some counter-intuitive effects of the introduction of the railways, particularly in respect of the military’s dependence on horses. The bulkiness of fodder meant that it had previously never been possible to transport it over any great distance because the animals would need to eat more than they could carry. Interestingly the arrival of the railways gave a new lease of life to the cavalry as large numbers of horses could be maintained by rail supply and the railways enabled production to be globalized, resulting in the production of massive quantities of cheap feedstuffs. Moreover, the cavalry could be transported to nearer the battlefield, keeping both men and animals fresh.
Napoleon’s wars were the last significant conflict before the advent of the railways. How he would have loved to have had them at his disposal, transforming the logistics at which he was so adept. His less gifted successors, the military leaders of the middle of the nineteenth century, would find it harder to adapt to their arrival than he would have done. The railways would require a complete change of tactics and the ability – or indeed failure – to exploit their potential to the full was to be a decisive factor in several conflicts. As with all innovations, the military, ever conservative and often fighting a previous war, were rarely, as we shall see in the forthcoming chapters, able to appreciate immediately the advantage they offered.
TWO
THE RAILWAYS CALLED INTO ACTION
After Napoleon’s defeat and exile, the absence of significant European wars in the first half of the nineteenth century coincided with the creation of the early railways and the beginning of their spread around the world. The construction of the first railways was stimulated by peaceful purposes for the carriage of both passengers and freight rather than for either defensive or offensive strategic objectives, but it was not long before some army commanders realized the railways’ military potential for the simplest task, moving troops around the country. And in the early days of the railways, more often than not the troops were deployed against their own people, rather than a distant enemy.
Indeed, the railways had shown their usefulness in that respect right from the start. Soon after its opening in 1830, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway carried a regiment of troops from Manchester to the docks in Liverpool on their way to quell a rebellion in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom. The thirty-one-mile journey took just over two hours, rather than the two days required to march that distance, and had the added advantage that the troops arrived in a far fresher condition. The railway’s owners were canny enough to negotiate a cheap rate for the carriage of troops on active service, the world’s first such agreement.
Britain’s railway system built up relatively slowly in the 1830s, but nevertheless by 1839 there was a line1 between Manchester and London which General Sir Charles Napier used to reach the capital after being called from his northern headquarters by the leader of the ruling Whigs, Lord John Russell. Sir Charles impressed Russell by arriving within twenty-four hours of the summons and was exultant about this new service, writing in his diary: ‘Well done steam! Smoke, thou art wonderful, and a reformer.’2 He had even more cause to be grateful to the railways a few weeks later when he needed the 10th Regiment of Foot stationed in Ireland to return rapidly to Manchester to quell yet another riot. Not only did the troops arrive speedily, but they were full of vigour and, according to Sir Charles, their numbers appeared to have grown on the journey: ‘One wing of the 10th came by morning train yesterday; the other by an evening train, which made everybody suppose two regiments had arrived.’3
Sir Charles, though, was something of an exception in his enthusiasm for the railways among British military men of the age. As an island nation with no enemies that could be reached without a journey by sea, the British did not really understand the railways’ potential for military use and there was little interest in the subject during the early days of the railway era. The usefulness of this new means of transport did not entirely escape the attention of the state, however, as legislation passed in 1842, one of the first laws affecting the railways, gave the military priority access to them. Two years later, a further Act imposed a duty on the railway companies to provide any trains required by the government for military purposes at a set fare that was well below the standard rate. Again, however, the thinking seems to have been around the railways’ usefulness in helping to quell internal dissent rather than to transport soldiers to war in foreign lands.
In Europe, however, there was more understanding of the railways’ military potential in conflicts between nations. In the early 1830s, even before any countries on the Continent had built significant lines, there were strategists who were aware that the railways could be used for military purposes.
In the Austrian empire and the states that would eventually form Germany, countries with lengthy and easily crossed land borders, it was these arguments which were deployed to stimulate the early development of railways. Indeed, several early supporters of the railways in continental Europe emphasized their military value over all else. In 1833, Friedrich Harkort, a Westphalian entrepreneur and railway pioneer, wrote a pamphlet advocating a railway between Minden and Cologne which, while stressing its value for the economy, also underlined its military potential by calculating how much quicker Prussian soldiers could reach various key towns by rail rather than on foot. Such connections were vital for Prussia, since the settlement at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 after Napoleon’s defeat had not given Prussia the Kingdom of Saxony that it wanted but rather a mountainous and woody tract of land in western Germany that became the Ruhr industrial heartland of the nation. It was separated from the main part of Prussia by a collection of small powerless states, which made good communications vital, especially as the local population were none too happy at being part of Prussia.
Harkort also promoted the idea of a much more overtly military railway, a line on the Prussian side of the Rhine which, he said, with some justification, would prevent the French ever reaching across the river since the railway would allow Prussian troops to be rushed to any spot under attack. Harkort, though, was before his time. As John Westwood asserts in his history of railways at war, ‘neither the Prussian military nor the Prussian press accepted Harkort’s ideas, preferring to make fun of him whenever they could not ignore him’.4 Writing nearly a decade after Harkort, Karl Pönitz found a more receptive audience with his 1842 treatise Railways and Their Utility from the Viewpoint of Lines of Military Operations, which elicited considerable interest in military quarters. The issue for Prussia, and later Germany, was always that it faced possible attack from two sides, Russia to the east and France to the west. Pönitz looked admiringly at Belgium: ‘The network of Belgian railways will be of as much advantage in advancing the industries of that country as it will be in facilitating the defence of the land against attack by France.’5
Pönitz had good reason to view Belgium as an example to follow. Right from its creation, Belgium had seen the railways and the military as having a symbiotic relationship. It was a new nation created by the split from the Netherlands in 1830 and the railways were seen not just as a way of establishing its national identity, but also as the means of maintaining its economic independence by providing an alternative transport system to the waterways dominated by its northern neighbour, which had, in the past, at times blocked off access to Antwerp. Belgium, where work began on the first railway in 1834, is not generally known for many world firsts but it was undoubtedly the unlikely pioneer in the understanding of the railways’ military value.
Pönitz therefore put forward the notion of a series of six east-west railways across Germany built for military rather than commercial reasons. These would be linked by a series of radial lines that would ensure communication could be maintained even if some sections of the web were destroyed. Pönitz even went as far as to calculate how many troops each line would be able to carry and how long it would take them to get to the frontier, elementary arithmetic which subsequent military commanders frequently failed to work out. However, while his ideas were met with approval from some military leaders, Germany was not in a position to undertake such a massive enterprise. At the time it was a loose Confederation of thirty-nine independent states which, like rival neighbouring football teams refusing to share a ground, were wary of joining together despite the obvious advantages. In particular, they were suspicious of anything suggested by Prussia, the most powerful state of the Confederation. Moreover, most of their railway systems were in private hands and since a network designed primarily to suit military purposes could never be expected to pay for itself, a strong government involvement and considerable subsidy would be needed.
It would, therefore, take several decades and the Franco-Prussian War for Pönitz’s ideas to bear fruit. In the meantime, the railways themselves were instrumental in bringing the states closer together economically – and therefore politically – by encouraging cross-border trade and making customs duties irrelevant, although the final union of the German empire did not take place until 1871.
The French, for their part, were even slower to recognize the military value of the railways. Indeed, according to the historian Armand Mattelart, the very notion of allowing them onto trains was ‘suspected of making soldiers effeminate’.6 Certainly, there were debates in French government circles as early as in the 1840s about the strategic value of railways but there was little consensus. Moreover, while the planned lines radiating out of Paris would have enabled troops to be despatched to France’s various frontiers – the Spanish, unlike the Germans and the Italians, had carefully chosen an alternative gauge for their railways so that they could resist any such invasion – the system was not designed with such aggressive intent in mind. After the initial rush following the opening of France’s first railway in 1832, the French had been rather sluggish in establishing anything like a railway network because of doubts among the intelligentsia about its value, prompting Helmuth von Moltke (the elder Moltke), later the long-serving Prussian Army leader but then only an ambitious staff officer, to remark sarcastically in 1844 that ‘while the French chamber debates railways, Germany builds them’.7
During most of the subsequent century, when railways were an essential component of warfare, the French military would have to make do for the most part with the tracks that happened to have been laid down for civilian needs. In the 1840s, it eventually started dawning on the French military hierarchy that the German railways might increase the potential for an invasion by their eastern neighbour, but they were never entirely convinced by the threat. The refusal to spot the obvious was well illustrated by the comments of the French consul in Mainz, in the Rhineland, who reported in 1849 that he felt ‘nothing indicates an offensive attitude, nothing that is hostile to France’.8 He was to be proved wrong three times within the next century.
All in all, given that the various elements among government and military leaders on both sides had begun, albeit slowly, to acknowledge the value of railways in a potential conflict and each one saw the other as its most dangerous military rival, both France and Germany were guilty of complacency in their strategic railway preparations. It was only in the run-up to the Franco-Prussian War, as we shall see in Chapter Four, that both sides belatedly began to examine how best to make use of the iron road in the event of war.
Any doubts about the value of the railways in a military context were to be dispelled by the terrifying events of the late 1840s. The ruling elites of Europe were, in the main, still absolute monarchs who had made scant concession to democracy; suddenly a wave of revolutionary and nationalist fervour swept the Continent and on numerous occasions troops were mobilized to crush these uprisings. Indeed, the most repressive regime of the age, the government of the Russian Tsar, was so fearful of people being able to travel more easily that it imposed regulations which required passengers to have a passport9 before being able to take the train linking Moscow with St Petersburg, ensuring that only the politically sound could move without hindrance around the country.
Of course, it worked both ways. The railways helped spread revolutionary ideas and were widely perceived as a democratizing force, opening up countries to people who had never been able to travel around them before. However, they also made it far easier for the strong arm of the state to impose itself on those who were perceived as a threat to the status quo. The ruling elites throughout Europe were soon routinely despatching troops by rail to maintain control and even began to build lines in the knowledge that a railway into a rebellious region was the key to nipping trouble in the bud. Therefore, while at first there had been an assumption that railways would be useful for governments in supporting an offensive or defending themselves against outside aggression, now they wer
e beginning to understand that their value was equally great in countering the threat within. As John Westwood, author of Railways at War, concludes, ‘the use which governments might make of railways for the movement of troops against internal dissidents had probably a greater appeal than the more purely strategic arguments’.10
The first significant transport of troops by rail was the despatch of 14,500 Prussian soldiers, together with their horses and wagons, to smash the Krakow rebellion of Polish nationalists in 1846, taking just two days to cover the 200-mile journey from their garrison at Hradish in Bohemia. Then, in 1848, Tsar Nicholas I, the most reactionary of the nineteenth-century monarchs – quite an accolade given the competition – got in on the act. He had no compunction in despatching 30,000 troops on the newly established Warsaw-Vienna railway to help his ally, the Austrian emperor, Ferdinand, quell a rebellion in Hungary in a particularly ruthless and bloody way. A few months later, the Austrians, in turn, made use of the railways to send reinforcements to reimpose their rule over Italy following a partial takeover by nationalists. That movement of troops stimulated the first recorded instance of railway sabotage when Venetian rebels, led by Daniele Manin, blew up some of the arches of the long viaduct linking their city with the mainland to try to prevent the Austrians reaching their island. They were unsuccessful as their sabotage only managed to lengthen the siege of the city, which ultimately fell to the Austrians in August 1849.
Engines of War Page 3