Engines of War

by Christian Wolmar

  The destruction of the Belgian railways delayed the progress of the German troops but did not entirely put paid to the Schlieffen Plan. Neither did the fierce, albeit brief, resistance of the Belgian Army. Instead, the plan was ultimately defeated by its own incoherence and the absence of a clear logistical framework, especially in relation to what was intended to happen once the troops and their horses had advanced beyond their railheads. The early German invasion swept all before it, with the result that the forward troops were soon much further ahead of their rail supply line than had been originally envisaged. At times parts of the German army were seventy or eighty miles from the railhead, which made it impossible to furnish them with food and ammunition from the rear. Consequently, it was back to the old Napoleonic practices of the troops having to live off the land. There was no problem feeding the men since the advance crossed rich agricultural land and – as with the start of most wars – it was harvest time. As ever, however, obtaining food for the horses was a much greater burden, necessitating foraging ever further afield and in several cases there were extreme shortages. Many horses were fed green corn, which can weaken or even kill the beasts, and the lack of horse transport was to prove damaging – especially, as we shall see later, at the battle of the Marne – since there were few railways available to the Germans. The cavalry was still deployed as an advance guard during the marches, but by the time the battle commenced they had been mostly immobilized as a consequence of the horses’ exhaustion. Most importantly, the animals’ poor condition was instrumental in limiting the mobility of the artillery, which was all horse-drawn. In some cases, a whole gun team had perished before crossing the border as a result of the shortage of fodder and by the time the Germans reached France on 24 August all the mounted forces were suffering from exhaustion. Ammunition, too, was in short supply. As mentioned in the last chapter, modern weapons used far more bullets and shells – which also tended to be heavier – than those in Napoleonic times, and it was no longer possible to keep up the supply to the guns from a couple of horse-drawn trucks ambling behind the front line.

  The Germans’ advance was hampered, too, by their mismanagement of the railways. So effective on their home territory, they forgot the vital rules that Haupt had set out in the American Civil War once they crossed their border. Understandably, it was more difficult running trains on another country’s network but that did not excuse the lack of discipline which characterized their operation of the Belgian lines. The railways were already in a bad shape thanks to the Belgians’ sabotage, but according to van Creveld the military authorities ‘reduced their efficiency still further by rushing through the greatest number of trains’,3 irrespective of the congestion that was caused and failing to allow time for the empty wagons to be returned. Worse, ‘impatient field commanders often interfered with the traffic, either “hijacking” trains destined for other units or putting wagons out of operation by using them as convenient magazines’. It was familiar stuff, the same mistakes that had been made by local military commanders ever since the railways had first been employed in warfare. Although van Creveld suggests that these were ‘temporary shortcomings which time and experience would cure’,4 by then the battle of the Marne had been fought and lost.

  By the end of August, the right flank of the German army was in a parlous state and its weakness was to prove fatal to the notion of the quick victory envisaged in the Schlieffen Plan. The German First Army was on the right wing of the sweep across Belgium, and the plan was dependent on those troops covering a huge distance in order not to get separated from the rest of the forces further south. Moltke had modified the Schlieffen Plan so that soldiers passed by Brussels rather than going further north with their ‘shoulders brushing the Channel’, but that still involved the German First Army covering a much greater distance than the forces further south. A diversionary attack by British forces on Antwerp, initiated by Churchill, though always doomed to defeat, was a cause of additional difficulties to the right flank. By early September, these troops, who had been covering distances of twenty to twenty-five miles a day, were exhausted, but it was impossible to give them even a day’s rest before throwing them into the battle of the Marne, where their role was to encircle the French from the rear. Their supply lines were over-extended and for most of their advance they were at least sixty miles in front of their railhead, which inevitably led to shortages of ammunition and food. Van Creveld estimates that whereas in the wars of the 1860s and 1870s it was possible for an army to operate a hundred miles in front of its railhead, by the start of the First World War the distance was around half that, depending on variables such as the weather, the state of the roads and the proximity of the enemy, because of an army’s increasing logistical requirements. Once in France, most of the Germans were rarely within fifty miles of their railhead during this initial phase of the war.

  The battle of the Marne was the first turning point of the war as it stopped the progress of the German invasion and initiated the process of entrenchment that was to last nearly four years. The Germans had advanced well into France by the end of August and Paris was braced for their arrival, with the government making preparations for its move to the safety of Bordeaux in the south-west. The French had all but given up, while the Germans were expecting to be able to walk into the capital with little resistance. At that point the flaws in the Schlieffen Plan became bitterly exposed. The troops on the right flank were simply too exhausted to be able to march further to the west and encircle Paris from the rear. Instead, the order came on 4 September for them to pursue the retreating French forces by turning south and passing Paris from the east to try to envelop them. By then the British Expeditionary Force, men of the regular army who had been despatched hastily over the Channel since there had been no time to organize conscription, was fighting alongside the French. The rapid arrival of the British in France had surprised the Germans, who had not expected them to intervene in their march through France and it had been made possible by the efficient use of the railways. Southampton had been chosen as the port of embarkation and a detailed timetable had been devised by railway and military planners that entailed special trains arriving at the port every twelve minutes, sixteen hours a day. The operation had been conducted remarkably well and by the end of August 670 trains had carried just under 120,000 men to the port for embarkation to France. The smoothness of the movement of troops had even attracted compliments from Lord Kitchener, a man not known to be generous with praise but who fancied himself as something of a logistics expert. And, more importantly, the Germans had not been aware of the BEF’s arrival until the two armies literally bumped into each other at Mons on 22 August, the day before the battle there.

  The battle of the Marne took place two weeks later, when the Allies realized that the German advance was stuttering and decided that a counter-attack was the best opportunity to stop the retreat and prevent any further invasion. They launched a massive attack on the German flank, splitting the enemy forces into two. The crucial figures in that decision were Maréchal Joseph Joffre, the head of the French Army, and the military governor of Paris, Général Joseph-Simon Gallieni. Joffre had always envisaged a counter-attack around Paris but it was Gallieni who had persuaded him of its precise nature when he spotted that the German flank had decided to pass to the east of the city.

  The decision to attack the Germans’ flank changed the course of the war – and indeed of history – at the cost of huge numbers of lives on both sides. The attack was launched on 6 September by the newly created French Sixth Army, made up of reservists and troops of the First and Second armies hastily redeployed from the abortive attack in Lorraine and supported, reluctantly, by the exhausted remnants of the BEF. Led by Général Michel-Joseph Maunoury, the French soon opened up a thirty-mile gap in the German lines and overcame fierce resistance to push the enemy into retreating for the first time in the war.

  At one point 6,000 reinforcements were sent to battle in a fleet of 600 taxicabs,5 a stor
y that has become legendary but was probably more important for morale than for its military value: ‘the last gallantry of 1914, the last crusade of the old world,’6 as Barbara Tuchman suggested. In fact, as A. J. P. Taylor explained, it was the French Army’s ability to use the railways to good effect that was to prove the decisive factor: ‘[the Germans] had been moving round the outside of a circle [round Paris] on foot, while the French could send troops straight across the circle by train’.7

  Indeed, the ability of the French to move troops by rail was not happenstance, but rather the result of Joffre’s understanding of how to make the best use of the railways. The lines emanated like the spokes of a bicycle wheel from Paris and there were few efficient cross-country routes (something which still pertains today, as anyone who has tried to take a train from, say, Bordeaux to Strasbourg can testify). The Schlieffen Plan had envisaged a flanking movement at a considerable distance from Paris, on routes that were ill-served by railways because they went round Paris and therefore were only served, at best, by minor lines. Nearer Paris there were better circular routes – including La Grande Ceinture, a kind of railway Périphérique which connected all the radial routes – and therefore Joffre recognized that it was essential to resist the German attacks at the right distance from the capital to allow the French to move easily along the front by rail on the radial lines while denying the Germans access to the Ceinture. According to Marc Ferro’s acclaimed essay on the war, ‘the victory of the Marne appears to be as much a result of Joffre’s strategic intelligence as of German blunders… Joffre soon came to see that, in the Paris region, the German plan would turn against Germany, and elected to fight there. From the beginning, he had demanded control of the railways; trained in technique, he had foreseen that his victory, the Marne, would be won on the French railways.’8

  Moreover, what French railways might have been available to the Germans had been blown up by the retreating forces. For the most part this destruction had been carried out thoroughly, but it was a difficult juggling act. The decision on when to demolish a railway line or bridge involved tough calculations and precise timing: ‘torn between the need to delay the enemy and the thought that tomorrow they might require bridges and railways themselves for a return to the offensive, the French left destruction of communications to the latest possible moment, sometimes too late’.9 At other times the French erred on the side of caution, blowing up bridges too soon and thus hindering their own logistics. The order for destruction could be given by relatively lowly officials and on occasion this resulted in blowing up bridges which were still needed: ‘nine local bridges were ordered to be destroyed by one prefect [the préfet, the chief of the local département] “as a simple measure of strategic prudence”; a few days later sappers were studying their reconstruction.’10 The same delicate balancing act was required for removing rolling stock from threatened lines. If coaches and locomotives were withdrawn too soon, it hampered the retreat but delaying too long ran the risk of leaving them in enemy hands. Fortunately for the French, on the Nord railway, the network most affected by the invasion, they got it right: while the company lost more than half its 2,400-mile network to the Germans it managed to retain the bulk of its stock.

  The battle of the Marne was decisive in that it halted the German advance, although van Creveld argues that the logistics would have told against the Germans anyway: ‘Had that battle [of the Marne] gone in their favour… there is every reason to believe that the state of the railway network would have prevented the Germans from following up their victory and penetrating further into France.’11 The Marne could have been even more decisive, resulting in an early end to the war, had not the victorious Allies’ pursuit of the fleeing enemy been so slow, hampered ironically by the damage to the railway carried out a couple of weeks previously by the retreating French. By 11 September, the British Expeditionary Force was forty miles ahead of its railhead, and had to pause to await resupply. The consequent delay allowed the Germans to regroup and dig themselves in along the Aisne river, where they were to remain until 1918. Therefore rather than ending the war, the battle of the Marne resulted in the prolonged stalemate.

  At the same time, the two sides began a series of encounters known as the ‘Race to the Sea’ but which were really a succession of abortive attempts to outflank each other. The route taken by each army during these clashes was determined by the location of two north-south railways: the French and British controlled the line through Amiens, while the Germans were able to use the railways through Lille. During the Race to the Sea, one last chance of keeping the war mobile presented itself. A month after the battle of the Marne, the British and Germans clashed at Ypres, rather by accident, when two intended offensive operations bumped into each other. The Germans proved stronger and at one point could have advanced through the British lines, which were protected only by ‘cooks and batmen’,12 but hesitated and, as Taylor explains, ‘as always happened, the defence brought in new men by rail faster than the attackers could move forward on foot. Once more the line thickened and settled down.’13

  In a way, while both the German and French railway-based plans had failed, paradoxically each had proved worthwhile. The Schlieffen Plan did not get the German troops to Paris but ensured they were ensconced in the north-east corner of France. As a consequence France had lost much of its industrial capacity and the front ran along physical features that largely gave the Germans the advantage of height. As for Plan XVII, it had helped prevent the invasion of France but it was too defensive and consequently had allowed the enemy forces to penetrate so far into France that they could not be dislodged once the French counter-attacked. The failings of the two plans set the course for the terrible stalemate on the Western Front that, as Barbara Tuchman says, ‘suck[ed] up lives at a rate of 5,000, sometimes 50,000 a day, absorbing munitions, energy, money, brains and trained men’.14 It is actually impossible to overestimate the impact of the events of this first month and the subsequent entrenchment: ‘The deadlock, fixed by the failure of the first month, determined the future course of the war, and, as a result, the terms of the peace, the shape of the inter-war period and the conditions of the Second Round.’15

  With the ending of the Race to the Sea in November 1914 and the establishment of a front line that stretched 200 miles from the Channel through eastern France to Switzerland, a different task for the railways emerged. On one matter, all sides were agreed. Supplies and men would principally be transported on the railways rather than on motor vehicles – mechanical transport (MT), as it was called – or by foot. Supply routes and railway lines were synonymous. There was no choice because neither the roads nor the available trucks were up to the task of moving millions of men. According to A. J. P. Taylor, at the beginning of the war, ‘no army had any mechanical transport. There were a few motor cars in which generals and staff officers travelled when they condescended to get off their horses. The men slogged along on foot once they reached the railhead.’16 Taylor is somewhat exaggerating as the French Army had 600 vehicles at the outbreak of war and the British Army 1,200, mostly requisitioned, which admittedly was insufficient for any major movements. Moreover, road transport was only really feasible as long as the weather was dry because the lorries kept to the roads and the horse transport went alongside in the fields. When it rained, the whole supply chain almost ground to a halt because the horses had to use the roads, slowing everything down to walking pace. There were indeed few lorries, though later in the war they became an integral part of the logistics despite their progress often being hampered by poor roads. In 1914, lorries were still remarkably primitive affairs. German army regulations stipulated that trucks were limited to being driven a mere sixty miles per day, six days a week, to allow for maintenance and repair. This was a wise precaution which the men disobeyed at their peril. This was demonstrated in the run-up to the battle of the Marne in early September when German attempts to use their lorries more intensively resulted in only 40 per cent being available f
or service because of accidents and breakdowns. The roads, too, were appalling, with few of them, other than major thoroughfares, being tarmacked. The location of fronts was determined by topography rather than accessibility and therefore they were not necessarily well served by road and, as we shall see later, another type of railway, running on rails just 60cm apart, became a vital part of the supply line.

  Neither side had anticipated a stalemate. While the Germans had planned for a quick decisive attack that would then allow them to focus their efforts solely on the Eastern Front, the British expected a mobile war that ebbed and flowed as in the days of Napoleon. Therefore neither side had prepared for the entrenched battle lines that developed by November 1914. Yet that was always going to be a likely result given the primitive state of military transport technology in 1914 with railways supplying both sides of the Western Front, which happened to be in an area well served by several lines, unlike, as we shall see in the next chapter, the Eastern Front, which had a much sparser railway network. The fact that the railway systems were highly developed but motor transport was still in its infancy gave defensive forces a key advantage and they were further helped by their ability to make use of local undamaged and familiar lines while the enemy, in hostile territory, only had unknown and frequently sabotaged railways at their disposal.