Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  The Schlieffen Plan was, of course, utterly dependent on the railways. More than that, it was in effect a railway timetable. The need for speed was paramount as the plan was based on the notion that there would be a window of just six weeks in which to overwhelm France before the troops had to be relocated eastwards to the Russian front. The plans for the advance were fixed beforehand, based on two notions that proved to be mistaken: that the small Belgian Army would not fight, and that they would not sabotage their railways. Liège was to be overrun by the twelfth day, the French frontier crossed on the twenty-second and the decisive victory, with the conquest of Paris, on the thirty-ninth day. It sounded all so straightforward and was ‘as rigid and complete as the blueprint for a battleship’, but it was an elaborate fantasy.

  In the decade before the war, annual revision of the plan took into account recent improvements to the rail network and these were set out in ever more complex detail. The first four days of mobilization were to be taken up with, first, the despatch of frontier defence troops and then experienced covering troops to protect the regions of deployment. It was only on the fifth day that mobilization of the bulk of the Army was envisaged and this would be carried out through a series of frequent railway movements between a limited number of embarkation and arrival points which all had a standard capacity of fifty trains per day 12 each way, including a window of four hours with no scheduled services in order to allow for mishaps and mistakes.

  Schlieffen envisaged one double pair of tracks for each army of around 200,000 men. An army corps (about 50,000 men) was allocated 140 trains, spread over seven days in order to allow an orderly entrainment. The breakdown of numbers and equipment shows the extent to which horses took up a large proportion of the overall capacity: of the 6,000 carriages which made up these trains, nearly half (2,965) were required for cavalry and a further 1,915 for artillery and supplies, with the rest for the infantry. Extensive rehearsals of these operations were carried out annually with war-game scenarios that tested the ability of the officers to improvise in the face of a damaged bridge or a broken-down train blocking the line.

  Stations had long been prepared for the rapid loading and unloading of military trains and it was in this that the Germans excelled. The capacity of a railway is often determined not by the number of trains, but the ability to ensure they can be loaded and unloaded efficiently. Even small stations had special unloading bays that could be used by artillery and most were provided with a hard-surfaced road alongside the track which could be used for unloading in an emergency. The plan allowed an hour to disembark a trainload of infantry and double that for an artillery battery. There was no on-board catering, which meant that the trains stopped for meals at predetermined stations for an hour while at smaller stations soldiers were allowed up to twenty minutes to buy produce from local pedlars. As soon as mobilization started, normal passenger services were to be greatly curtailed, though not, as the military had sought, scrapped entirely, since the government recognized that this would be impractical and liable to lead to civil unrest as it would result in shortages of food and fuel in towns.

  To ensure that railways could be repaired and small extra sections of line built speedily, Prussia created a railway regiment out of the disparate companies that emerged from the 1870 war, comprising a total of just under 5,000 officers and men. To support this initiative, the Army compiled a detailed list of all reservists possessing railway experience and still eligible for military service who could be called upon quickly as reinforcements. A staff officer was allocated to every line and, far from being considered as a backwater for unambitious officers, the railway section of the general staff was a highly regarded placement. According to Barbara Tuchman: ‘The best brains produced by the War College, it was said, went into the railway section and ended up in lunatic asylums’,13 presumably because ensuring the smooth operation of the railways needed a particularly meticulous but quite narrowly focussed mind.

  Physically, the lines were in place. The nine main routes leading towards France dating from 1870 had been improved and increased: by 1911, there were no fewer than nineteen rail crossings over the Rhine, sixteen of which were double-tracked. There were, too, a series of lines leading towards Belgium. Several had initially been built as single-tracked light railways but were converted into double-track heavy rail lines by 1909 when sidings ‘out of all proportion to the local traffic’14 were also constructed. This had not escaped the notice of the French secret services (the Deuxième Bureau, loosely equivalent to MI5), who, observing the pattern of rail-line construction, were able to anticipate that it was highly likely that Belgian neutrality would be violated. Edwin Pratt, the historian, is in no doubt that German intent was clear from its construction of railways heading into Belgium on a scale that far exceeded actual demand: ‘The German War Department has arranged for a simultaneous advance by fourteen separate routes across Holland, Belgium and the Grand Duchy. In view of all these facts, there is no possible room for doubt as to the prolonged and extensive nature of the preparations made by Germany for the war she instigated in 1914.’15 According to Allan Mitchell, ‘it was the study of rail patterns that led the Deuxième Bureau to a near certainty that a German attack could be expected north of the Moselle river through Luxemburg and a southern portion of Belgium’.16 The lack of similar activity in the east, towards Russia, also allowed the French to assume that the Germans were intending to adopt a defensive posture towards Russia, rather than trying to invade it. Therefore, from the study of the railways, the French had sufficient evidence to know the German plans and yet, because of disagreements among the generals, they only partially acted on it.

  The French, of course, had their own plans for mobilization and for the military takeover of the railways at the outbreak of war. As with the German plan, there was no hesitation about who would take control of the railways in the advent of war, but the details of the organization were not as comprehensive or focussed as those of their eastern neighbour. Like the Germans, there was a shadow military organization ready to take control of the railways at the outbreak of war. The railways, most of which were owned by six major companies, remained private concerns, which caused much handwringing among the military about the potential difficulties this would cause in wartime, but an agreement worked out in 1903 ensured that the railways would be requisitioned for military purposes as soon as it became necessary. Once war broke out, the railways were to be divided into two: control of the Interior Zone would remain with the railway authorities while the Army Zone would be run by the military. The military had, as in Germany, pressed for greater standardization of equipment between the private companies, to make it easier for rolling stock to move between them, but this had largely fallen on deaf ears.

  The lessons of 1870-71 had been understood, and, indeed, any resistance by the railways to military proposals was routinely met with references to that humiliating conflict. In the 1880s, the French war ministry had created a Commission Supérieure on which generals, civil servants from Ponts et Chaussées and senior railway managers sat to devise a wartime rail policy. A plethora of laws – no fewer than seventeen were passed within a decade of the Franco-Prussian War – emerged from this committee dealing with everything from the technical instruction of railway troops to the systematic destruction of railways which were likely to fall into the hands of the enemy. The French do not do bureaucracy by halves and these rules were codified into a massive 700-page volume in 1902 which remained largely unaltered until the outbreak of war in 1914. A railway regiment of around 3,000 men was formed and a line commission was established for each of the main railway systems consisting of both railway and military staff. The legislation drawn up to cover the eventuality of war proved to be useful in peacetime during the 1910 railway strike which the war ministry broke by using emergency laws to instruct the strikers that they were conscripted to undertake ‘army exercises’ and failure to carry out these orders would result in punishment for desertion – a
potentially capital offence.

  The French, like the Germans, had built railways that would be invaluable for mobilization, with the same squabbles between the military and railway companies over who should pay for them. In 1870, France had only six direct lines to the German frontier but by 1888 there were fifteen main arteries of mobilization, nearly one for each army corps, and all of them were double-tracked. The military not only pressed for the construction of lines and the addition of tracks, which they funded in cases where the lines had no commercial value, but also imposed a veto on the construction of lines that might be prejudicial to defence, particularly in the region covered by the Est company, which was always going to be in the front line. In particular, several lines that went too close to fortresses were vetoed, although modern artillery had pretty much made the very idea of hilltop redoubts redundant.

  The French equivalent of the Schlieffen Plan was Plan XVII, which, as its numbering suggests, had gone through many iterations and the latest version had been finalized a year before the outbreak of the war. Despite its name, Plan XVII, finalized in 1911 by Général Joseph Joffre, was not a plan of military operations, but merely a scheme for delivering large numbers of troops to whatever front might emerge. It established in great detail the role that each line and each station was to play according to various scenarios depending on the provenance of the attack. It had started out life as Plan XIV in 1898, taking into account the weaker forces that France was likely to have at its disposal. While initially the plan was based on the expectation that a German attack would come directly from the border, later versions did place some emphasis on the notion that Germany might attack through Belgium. As Barbara Tuchman puts it: ‘Unlike the Schlieffen Plan, Plan XVII contained no stated overall objective and no explicit schedule of operations.’17 It was a defensive plan that was designed to respond to an attack from the Germans rather than to launch an offensive, although it provided for a continued advance into Germany once the initial attacks had been repelled.

  The Russians, too, were making preparations. Despite their poor record in recent conflicts – defeat in the Crimea and Manchuria and difficulty in overcoming the Turks at Plevna – the rest of Europe was terrified of the Great Bear, largely because of its sheer size and ability to put more men into battle than any other nation. The prospect of a battle against the Russians instilled terror. Barbara Tuchman is again eloquent: ‘The savage cavalry charge of yelling Cossacks was such a fixture in European minds that newspaper artists in August 1914 were able to draw it in stirring detail without having been within a thousand miles of the Russian front.’18 For the French and British, the massive Russian steamroller was seen as a source of comfort, while in Germany there was a permanent dread of the Slav hordes in the east. And hordes there were. Including reservists, the Russians had a potential available force of 6.5 million men. The problem, of course, would be getting them to the front fast enough, although in the event this proved easier than envisaged. The French were desperate for the Russians to be an effective force and through a series of loans and the offer of military advisers improved both the Russian Army and the railways. Throughout the early 1910s, the French worked hard to cement their alliance with the Russians through regular meetings between the top military on each side and these negotiations bore fruit in 1912, when they secured the commitment from General Gilinsky, the chief of the Russian general staff, that within two weeks of the outbreak of war the Russians would have 800,000 men at the front.

  This was fanciful. In any mobilization, the Russian soldiers not only had to travel much further to reach their regiments – the average was 700 miles compared with fewer than 200 miles for the German troops – but also their journeys would be on a railway system that was inadequate to the task because, compared with the German railways, it had only one-tenth of the length of track per square kilometre. There was, too, the difficulty of the incompatibility in gauge, that brilliant defensive measure which, as we have already seen in the previous chapter, had proved to be a major barrier to launching successful attacks. Barbara Tuchman highlights the problem succinctly: ‘To send an army into modern battle on enemy territory, especially under the disadvantage of different railway gauges, is a hazardous and complicated undertaking requiring prodigies of careful organization. Systematic attention to detail was not a notable characteristic of the Russian Army.’

  Russian preparation for the war had indeed been chaotic. The war minister for the five years running up to the outbreak of war was an old-fashioned, idle womanizer, General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, typical of the aristocracy who ran the country: ‘clinging stubbornly to obsolete theories and ancient glories, he claimed that Russia’s past defeats had been due to mistakes of commanding officers rather than to any inadequacy of training, preparation or supply’.19

  His proudest boast was that he had not read an army manual for a quarter of a century. It showed. Sukhomlinov, a veteran of the Turkish campaign of the late 1870s, stopped the process of modernization that had been proceeding gradually since the defeat at the hands of the Japanese, and he sacked a chief of staff every year during his tenure. His preparations – or rather lack of them – left the Russian Army perilously short of equipment, notably guns and shells, and the plans were predicated on the basis that the war would be conducted with hordes of soldiers wielding bayonets rather than guns.

  However, as we shall see in the next chapter, in the event Russia mobilized surprisingly efficiently thanks to the efficacy of its railways. The improvements introduced thanks to the support of the French had not been incorporated into the Russian military’s plans, possibly because the railway authorities feared that impossible demands would be placed on them if the extent of the facilities had been known. Russia’s preparations for war were embodied in Plan 19, which had first been drawn up in 1910 and had not been significantly amended to take into account the subsequent improvements. The scheme envisaged the curtailing of all civilian traffic apart from a daily mail train, a measure that was rather easier to impose in what was an authoritarian monarchist police state than in the other combatant countries, which had more democratic political cultures, and a traffic of thirty-six trains per day, still quite ambitious given the state of the railways, travelling around 250 miles in a day. There were roughly ten lines pointing westward, which therefore gave the Russians the potential to mobilize rather more effectively and quickly than the Germans envisaged. In fact, the Russians had a further programme of railway improvements which would have made mobilization even more effective. By 1917, the general staff were expecting to be able to deliver 560 trains daily to the front, suggesting perhaps that it was fears about this extensive upcoming investment in the railways, which would soon have exposed the Schlieffen Plan as totally unworkable, that determined the timing of the war. According to one source, ‘shortly before Sarajevo, the Kaiser reportedly believed that “the big Russian railway constructions were preparations for a great war which could start in 1916”… and “wondered whether it might not be better to attack rather than to wait”’.20

  The Russian government as ever was as much terrified by the enemy within, the growing movement against the tsarist regime, as any external threat. In order to cope with militant workers and revolutionaries who might be tempted to strike or take to the streets when war was declared, the secret police arranged for armoured trains to patrol lines that might be affected by civil disorder. This precaution proved unnecessary because, just as in Berlin, London, Paris and Vienna, patriotic feeling for the war overrode long-standing feelings of discontent.

  The British planned for war, too, but, sensibly, on the assumption that it would not take place on their soil. Their preparations, therefore, were focussed principally on how to organize the railways to facilitate the despatch of troops to ports and the creation of a railway corps which would be able to maintain and repair railways both in Britain and, should a force be sent overseas, in other countries. Previous planning had actually been directed at how to mobilize the
railways against an invasion but had been carried out in a typically British amateurish approach. In 1865 the Engineer and Railway Volunteer Staff Corps was created, gathering together army officers with railway managers who were made honorary colonels or majors. The Corps, which was a voluntary body with no official backing from the War Office, was an officer-only body which created a fantastically elaborate 311-page book of timetables covering six different concentrations of troops against invasion. Given that the military was reluctant to provide information to the civilians in the Corps, ‘these timetables had had to be compiled largely by guesswork’ and consequently ‘the result may well have been a shambles’.21 Fortunately these plans were never put to the test, but it was not long, however, before the government realized that the outbreak of war would require special measures in relation to the railways and wanted to ensure there would be no doubt as to who would be in charge of them in wartime. Consequently legislation covering the nationalization of the railways in the event of war was passed in 1871 but it was not until 1896 that a War Railway Council, composed of both railway and military members, was created to advise the military on railway matters in the event of a war.

  The one major test for these wartime arrangements prior to 1914 had been the Boer War, when nearly a quarter of a million men and 30,000 horses, along with guns, ammunition and other supplies, were sent to Southampton on their way to the Cape. According to Pratt, ‘the operations were conducted with perfect smoothness, there being no overtaxing either of the railway facilities or of the dock accommodation’.22 He put this down to the appointment of a railway transport officer at Southampton who acted as an intermediary between the railway company, the military and the docks and co-ordinated their requirements. Most crucially, the railway transport officer, irrespective of his rank, had the final say over the train schedule and under the regulations not even a general could countermand his decision. This ensured that the railway managers only had to deal with one source of military authority. Similar railway transport officers were appointed at other key stations used for the despatch of troops to South Africa and this innovation proved vital in the organization of rail transport in the First World War. Following the Boer War, the railway branch of the Royal Engineers became firmly established and two permanent railway companies were created and trained on a specially created military railway.