Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  In 1912, as tension mounted in Europe, the British government, conscious that the implications of the legislation on railways in wartime had not really been properly thought through, created the Railway Executive Committee to replace the purely advisory War Railway Council, consisting of managers of the biggest railway companies, who, it was envisaged, would take complete control of the railways during wartime. As a result, later in the year there were extensive army manoeuvres designed to test how fast troops could be deployed and assess how easily the railways could absorb the extra traffic. Oddly, the exercise, which involved 200 trains, took place in East Anglia, the territory of the Great Eastern, an unlikely setting for any actual troop movements, which were always likely to be focussed on the seaports of the south coast served by the London & South Western. Nevertheless, they passed off successfully, with King George V remarking on how it seemed possible for the railways to cope with both the extra troop trains as well as the normal traffic. The satirical magazine Punch could not resist lampooning these efforts, by commenting that ‘one of the chief objections to hostilities in this country disappears now that it has been shown that our golfers would be able to get to their courses without interference’.23 However, as we shall see in the next chapter, British mobilization would prove remarkably effective.

  The Austro-Hungarian Empire also had a detailed mobilization plan on similar lines to the German scheme, but with the added complication that the Austrians did not know who their enemy was going to be. Therefore, the whole of Europe had plans to mobilize their armies based on the correct premise that it was only the railways which could deliver the enormous numbers of men to the front. This was, though, uncharted territory given that the scale of preparation was far greater than for any other previous war. Not only were more countries involved, but, as already mentioned, there had been a huge increase in the size of the armies since Napoleon’s time. In total, across Europe, there were 20 million men in varying degrees of readiness who could be mobilized quickly at the outbreak of the war, more than at any time in history. Moreover, the requirements of these vast bodies of men had increased by an even greater proportion than the numbers of troops since the impedimenta, as van Creveld calls it, carried by armies into the field had become vastly more complex. Each man needed more equipment and, on average, fired more bullets and shells – which were mostly larger than before – and used artillery that was heavier and less manoeuvrable: ‘The wagons constituting the train (field bakeries, hospitals, engineering equipment etc) of a German army corps [50,000 men] numbered thirty in 1870 but had more than doubled forty years later.’24 Moreover, not only were there more guns requiring a constant supply of shells, but the damage they would inflict created extra demands. Whereas previously heavy artillery was almost indestructible, now it could be destroyed by enemy action and consequently need to be replaced.

  The railways were a key component in an arms race that seemed almost bound to lead to conflict. In a famous essay, the historian A. J. P. Taylor went as far as to suggest that the very existence of these plans based on railway timetables made war inevitable.25 Taylor argued that the lengthy elaboration of these plans was not a signal of intent but rather an attempt by each one of the various continental powers to develop a deterrent that would persuade their rivals that it was too risky to embark on an invasion by signalling that they were the most powerful regional power. Instead, Taylor suggested, the logic of the process led them into a war none of them expected to have to fight, because when the crisis began in the summer of 1914, the need to mobilize faster than their potential opponents made the leaders prisoners of their own logistics. Specifically, Taylor says that the fact that mobilization plans were entirely dependent on railways since the automobile was hardly used (except by the odd general speeding to his headquarters) meant that a point of no return was quickly reached. Constrained by the limitations of the railway, every country had to try to mobilize faster than its rivals and consequently it was the strictures of the railway timetables that forced them into conflict: ‘All the European powers had built up vast armies of conscripts. The plans for mobilising these millions rested on railways; and railway timetables cannot be improvised. Once started, the wagons and carriages must roll remorselessly and inevitably forward to their predestined goal.’26 Mobilization, he suggests, should not have been the trigger for war because it takes place within a country’s own borders and there had, in fact, been previous such call-ups of men in the years running up to the war which had not resulted in conflict.

  This misses the point. The notion that it was all down to the railway timetable is fundamentally flawed, resulting from Taylor’s failure to understand railway operations. He was, in fact, using his theory about the railways to back up his wider argument that, at the time the war broke out, tensions in Europe were receding and the war was therefore the result of an unfortunate series of events rather than an inevitable outcome of the geopolitical situation. While the railway timetables were, obviously, a vital component of the mobilization, they were not as inflexible as he suggests. He argues that they had been timed to the minute, months or even years previously, and therefore could not be changed. However, the German plans, for example, had, as mentioned above, a four-hour period every day when no trains were scheduled. Moreover, previous experience stretching back to the days of Haupt and the American Civil War had shown that skilled rail operators can work miracles on a railway route provided they are given total control of the workings, as had indeed been granted to the military in most of these countries.

  The inevitability of war once the process of mobilizing these 20 million men had commenced was more the result of the inflexibility of the military mind than any predetermined logistics resulting from the railway system. If anything was the deciding factor, it was the attitude of the younger Moltke, the central character in this drama. Moltke was a reluctant chief of staff. A lugubrious character who wore such a permanently downbeat expression that the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, called him ‘the sad Julius’ (unaccountably since he bore the same name as his illustrious uncle Helmuth), he responded to his appointment by asking the Kaiser whether he expected ‘to win the big prize twice in the same lottery’, a suggestion that he was only offered the post thanks to his name. According to Barbara Tuchman, he undertook the task only on condition that ‘the Kaiser stopped winning all the war games, which was making a nonsense of manoeuvres.’27 Amazingly, the Kaiser obeyed.

  After the assassination on 28 June 1914 of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire, by a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a series of diplomatic manoeuvres and threats brought Europe to a crisis. The Serbians wanted Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Austrians had administered since 1878, to be part of the then autonomous Kingdom of Serbia, while the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, suspecting that the ever-troublesome Serbian government had been involved in the murder, decided to take a strong line. They consulted with Germany, which promised to back them should Russia, Serbia’s traditional ally, threaten to intervene. Strangely, both Moltke and the Chancellor, Wilhelm II, went off on holiday during this growing diplomatic imbroglio. An Austro-Hungarian ultimatum was finally sent on 23 July and pretty much accepted by the Serbians ‘with just enough reservations to save a scrap of prestige’,28 according to Taylor. Too many, though, for the Habsburgs, who promptly declared war, which was something of a gesture since the empire was not ready to call up its troops.

  It was enough to trigger off a chain reaction. Russia began mobilizing, hesitated and stopped, and then resumed. The Germans demanded that the Russians desist but were met with a refusal, and so began calling up troops themselves. It was at this stage that the issue of the railway timetable came into play, but not in the way that Taylor suggests. A conversation between Prince Lichnowsky, the German ambassador in London, and the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, on 1 August was misinterpreted by the ambassador as an offer by Britain
to stay out of a war between Russia and Germany. The Kaiser leapt on this as a possible solution to the concerns about fighting simultaneously on two fronts and rushed to see Moltke. Time was pressing. The first act of war was to be the seizure of a railway junction in Luxembourg, which was a vital through-route to France for the Germans. It was scheduled to take place at 7 p.m. and the Kaiser went to ask Moltke to stop the action. It was not that the Kaiser wanted to prevent the outbreak of war but rather, at this very late stage, he wanted the troops to go east rather than west. Moltke was not being asked to stop the trains, but merely to reverse them. He was unequivocal. Moltke had spent eleven years working towards this day, first as Schlieffen’s assistant and then as his successor, and he was not going to bow to the Kaiser’s impulse with the vain hope of a one-front war. In an image redolent of the French chaos in the early stages of the Franco-Prussian War, ‘he saw a vision of the deployment crumbling apart in confusion, supplies here, soldiers there, ammunition lost in the middle, companies without officers, divisions without staffs, and those 11,000 trains, each exquisitely scheduled to click over specified tracks at specified intervals of ten minutes, tangled in a grotesque ruin of the most perfectly planned military movement in history’.29 It was not to be. Moltke refused, telling the Kaiser: ‘Your Majesty, it cannot be done. The deployment of millions cannot be improvised…’ and fatefully added the words, ‘and once settled, it cannot be altered.’30 Therefore it wasn’t stopping the trains that Moltke felt was impossible – it was reversing the thrust of the attack. He was, in any case, intent on beating the French, indeed had lived for that moment. He was not going to turn back on the advice of a mercurial Kaiser. Germany that day declared war on Russia, a move which has later been considered unnecessary but which clearly had nothing to do with railway timetables. The decision was not a result of logistics, but of politics. Russia, for its part, was well aware that its mobilization would be taken as an act of aggression by the Germans, triggering a whole series of responses. Contrary to what Taylor suggested, mere mobilization by Russia, feared so much by Germany, was in itself a casus belli.

  That was not quite the end of the matter. The Kaiser sent a telegram to King George seeking clarification and, as the deadline for the attack on defenceless Luxembourg approached, his Chancellor, Bethmann, insisted that no military action should take place before they received a reply. The Kaiser’s telegram was an attempt to stop the invasion, which was to be carried out by an infantry company of the 69th Regiment under command of a Lieutenant Feldmann. It was too late. The First World War had started, not by the rumbling of trains but with a small convoy of cars led by the lieutenant entering the small town of Ulflingen, known locally as Trois Vierges, where the Germans seized the station and telegraph office. It was undoubtedly a coincidence that the Germans had launched the bloodiest war in history by violating a place whose name represented Faith, Hope and Charity, but was later perceived in the public mind as connoting Luxembourg, Belgium and France. Hastily, once the Kaiser’s telegram had been received, a second convoy was sent to call back the lieutenant and his men, but finally, once King George’s reply made clear no such deal was on the table, the Kaiser acquiesced to the Luxembourg invasion. Soon after midnight, an armoured train was sent across the frontier, followed by a trainful of Feldmann’s men, and by the end of the day, 2 August, the whole of the small Grand Duchy had been occupied.

  Would it have been possible to refocus the direction of attack at such a late stage? The Schlieffen Plan, which was regularly revised, certainly included a contingency for an alternative plan against Russia with all the trains running eastward. General von Staab, the chief of the German railway division, upon reading Moltke’s memoirs published after the war, which said that it could not have been done, responded with a book to prove that it could have been. In pages of charts and graphs, Staab explained how, given notice on 1 August, within two weeks he could have deployed four out of seven armies to the Eastern Front. However, there would have been no question of a quick victory in the east, unlike the rapid takeover of France envisaged by Schlieffen. The paucity of railways and the sheer size of Russia would have held up the Germans for far longer than a few weeks. It would have been a different war, but probably one that was just as prolonged and which in all likelihood would have spread to a second front given the various alliances across Europe.

  There are other good grounds to dismiss the Taylor thesis, most notably that the numerous other factors leading to conflict make the rigidity of railway timetables an unlikely catalyst. Historians list twenty or more possible causes, and while the debate over the weight that should be attached to each of them has never been resolved, there are compelling reasons to suggest war was inevitable given the political situation in Europe in 1914. German military ambitions were not a passing whim and the strengthening of its navy over the past twenty years was a threat to the other Great Powers, apart from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The continued weakening of the Habsburg empire created an air of instability in central Europe and there were continuing arguments over the colonial ambitions of the various European nations. The diplomatic failings in the immediate run-up to the war had a long history and these disputes were always likely to boil over into something far more serious. Europe was a ferment of possible conflict, and it would not take much to light the blue touchpaper, particularly since all sides, their trains bedecked with signs bearing the jingoistic slogans ‘Nach Paris’ or ‘À Berlin’, thought it would all be over by Christmas or even before the leaves fell off the trees.

  Taylor’s analysis is probably best thought of as an allegory on the nuclear arms race which was raging at the time he was writing and which, as a prominent member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, he strenuously opposed. In a broader sense, if Taylor had merely emphasized that the build-up of railway strength in the Great Powers during the run-up to the conflict was significant, then his argument would have been irrefutable. But to place the blame for the outbreak of war on the rigidity of timetables is a step too far.

  Taylor was on firmer territory when he stressed, as we have seen, that the military on all sides were convinced that attack was the best form of defence. The disaster of the First World War was that the Great Powers all had offensive military doctrines, which encouraged them to attack first while the new technology – barbed wire, machine guns and, especially, railway networks – all favoured defence. All the major powers had commissioned reports on the experiences from previous wars, notably the American Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War, where there had been clear demonstrations of the effectiveness of defensive firepower and the advantages of holding positions against attackers. Yet, thanks to Clausewitz, whose doctrine had ordained a quick victory through a decisive battle – such as at Königgrätz – the military establishments across the whole of Europe believed that the advantage was with the attackers. Clausewitz, though, had written his thesis almost a hundred years previously, long before the railways had been invented, and yet, as Barbara Tuchman notes acidly, ‘his works had been accepted as the bible of strategy ever since.’31 As the next chapter shows, it was the defenders, helped by the railways, who had the advantage for most of the war and military strategy needed rewriting.

  SEVEN

  THE GREAT RAILWAY WAR ON THE WESTERN FRONT

  The Germans did not get to Paris in thirty-nine days. Or in fact ever. The Schlieffen Plan did not work and generations of historians have subsequently analysed its shortcomings. Moltke took the rap and soon resigned but it was the inherent failings of the plan, not his tinkering, which led to its undoing. Neither can blame for its failure be laid at the door of the German railways. They had been taken over, as envisaged, by the military authorities, who, despite being at times ‘overzealous and overbearing’,1 carried out the task of mobilization remarkably efficiently. On 4 August, the long-prepared war timetables were introduced, which greatly limited any traffic other than military. The first trains to be despatched carried infantry brigades destined f
or the capture of Liège, the vital Belgian railway junction in the Meuse Valley, and over the following two weeks 3 million soldiers were carried by the railways in more than 11,000 trains. Yet, according to John Westwood, ‘nevertheless, the German railways were never extended to their full capacity during this period; they could have carried even more traffic.’2 There were, though, enormous bottlenecks on the Belgian railways, notably in Liège, through which much of the attack was funnelled.

  The plan failed because of its strategic and logistical flaws. Not only was it based on the mistaken assumption that the Belgians would surrender without a fight and keep their railways intact, but it expected too much of the troops on the right flank, who were supposed to march much further than was realistic if they were to be in a fit state to fight. In fact, after the failure of German diplomatic negotiations – which had all the subtlety of an armed bank robber demanding the money from a terrified teller – Albert, the Belgian king, ordered the destruction of railway tunnels and bridges even before the first German troops had set foot in his country. Consequently, the Belgians set about disabling their railway system with ruthless efficiency, concentrating on blowing up the tunnels to prevent any hope of rapid repair. After the invasion, the Germans deployed large numbers of men, a force of 26,000 workers, to try to sort out the broken railways but to little avail. Even a month after the German occupation of Belgium at the onset of the crucial battle of the Marne in early September, only a sixth of the 2,400-mile Belgian rail network was functioning. Moreover, the surviving lines were in a poor state. Most of the rolling stock had been destroyed or taken to France by the Belgians, and even where the track had been left intact, signalling equipment was sabotaged. The Belgians also indulged in the kinds of tricks deployed the world over by reluctant railway workers, such as routing trains onto the wrong lines at junctions or ‘mistakenly’ sending them into sidings.