Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History)

by Dennis Showalter

  This perception was reinforced as Russia’s suspicion of Bismarck’s good will reached new peaks during the Bulgarian crisis of 1885. Russia’s position in the state it had helped establish only seven years earlier virtually collapsed from Russian heavy-handedness. Nevertheless Bismarck emerged as the villain, the wire-puller and manipulator. He was presented in St. Petersburg as simultaneously obstructing Russia’s legitimate Balkan claims and encouraging her further involvement in the swamp of Bulgarian politics.31

  In this context golden bullets began acquiring new importance. Since the 1850s, Russia’s domestic problems had been increasingly coalescing into what modern economic theory describes as a crisis of development. Costly foreign wars and territorial expansion in central Asia, combined with expensive programs of railroad building and industrialization, put unheard-of strains on the imperial treasury. The actual and potential supplies of private capital in Russia were limited. A political system neither strong enough nor autocratic enough to practice the forced bootstrapping common in the twentieth century turned logically to external sources.

  German bankers and investors had been funding Russian economic enterprises for decades. Bismarck’s own banker, Gerson Bleichröder, was deeply involved in the marketing of Russian securities, selling some of the paper to Bismarck himself.

  The recipients of this German largesse were anything but suitably grateful. Nationalists argued that the interest rates were too high and the terms too short: Imperial Russia was being treated like a deadbeat gambler. Financiers were concerned with the growing complexity of a public debt contracted without any systematic planning. Panslavs took alarm at the threats posed by German involvement in Russia’s economic life. Businessmen demanded higher tariffs, protecting their infant industries from German competition.32

  By the mid-1880s the German foreign office was also questioning the success of Bismarck’s embryonic economic diplomacy. Germany seemed to have benefitted little from official and private efforts to sustain Russia’s development. The Cobdenite argument that, properly understood, a state’s economic and diplomatic interests must coincide had never been widely accepted even in German liberal circles, much less among the group of young diplomatic Turks whose spokesman was Friedrich von Holstein.

  Holstein’s critics then and now have considered him a man of limited vision, blinded to the value of Germany’s Russian connection by his hostility towards Bismarck, his sympathy for the ramshackle Habsburg Empire, and his identification with the saber-rattling militants urging a war of conquest in the east. Holstein was, however, by no means a blind Russophobe. Since joining the foreign office in 1876 he had observed and participated in Bismarck’s increasingly desperate efforts to integrate Russia into a stable European network. The process had convinced him that the chancellor was making a fundamental error. Not France, but Russia, Holstein reasoned, was the greatest ultimate threat to Germany’s security. France might be the clearer and more present danger, but a good big man can be expected to whip a good little man. Should France try conclusions with the German Empire, what happened in 1870–71 would happen again.

  Russia, on the other hand, combined tremendous economic and military potential with the power of an idea. Her Alsace-Lorraine was the entire Balkan peninsula, if not Central Europe itself. In Holstein’s view Russia’s geopolitical ambitions threatened—or promised—not merely to bring all southeastern Europe under her sway, but to generate what later diplomatic generations would describe as Austria’s Finlandization, if not her complete disappearance.33 In the aftermath of the Bulgarian crisis, Holstein worked in tandem with the chancellor to foster an anti-Russian coalition of the great powers. The Mediterranean Agreements of 1887, linking Britain, Italy, and Austria in defense of a regional status quo, gratified him at least as much as they did Bismarck. But the fundamental dichotomy between the foreign policy positions of the two men remained. Bismarck wanted to keep Germany in the middle, holding the balance between Russia on one hand, Austria and the other Mediterranean powers on the other. For Holstein and the increasing number of his supporters, the new treaties merely cleared the ground for a confrontation that would show Russia her place at the international table once more—a place she had to date been unwilling to accept by peaceful persuasion.34

  In a Russia already suspicious of German good will and German intentions, Panslavs and nationalists put increasing, and ultimately successful, pressure on Alexander to abandon the Three Emperors’ League. An increasing number of voices suggested the virtues of a French connection. Bismarck responded by negotiating the Reinsurance Treaty of June, 1887. Its key was a mutual guarantee of neutrality except in case of a German attack on France or a Russian attack on Austria. But the belligerence and antagonism shown by the Russian press and the Russian foreign office during the negotiations boded ill for a long-term German-Russian entente. Should Germany’s western front explode, was any piece of paper strong enough to bind Russia to its terms?35

  Economic tension exacerbated diplomatic suspicions. Before the Reinsurance Treaty was negotiated, Bismarck was under pressure from both market agriculture and heavy industry to respond to a recent round of Russian tariff increases. In May, 1887, the tsar’s government introduced new restrictions on foreign ownership of property in Russia, generating corresponding anxiety among actual and prospective German investors. Russian securities began to diminish in attractiveness and drop in value on the Berlin bourse. The German press, partly with Bismarck’s encouragement, began to raise alarms. The Reichstag debated the wisdom, political and economic, of continuing to accept Russian commercial paper. On November 10, Bismarck issued the Lombardverbot.

  The order’s scope should not be exaggerated. It simply forbade the German state bank to accept Russian securities as collateral. Russia did begin transferring securities out of Germany after November 10. Some went to France, some back home for purchase by private banks, some to other European capitals. This, however, was not a politically motivated reaction to a diplomatic initiative. Russia’s government still had no real cabinet structure. Ministries worked in separate compartments, often virtually unaware of each other’s problems. Attempting to influence Russian foreign policy directly by financial pressure correspondingly resembled attracting the attention of a dinosaur by giving the beast a hotfoot. By the time the message reached its intended goal, any response was likely to be irrelevant to the current situation.36

  Austria for her part had reacted to the nonrenewal of the Three Emperors’ League with a burst of anxiety. Russian troop concentrations in Poland and the Ukraine generated Habsburg demands for clarification of the Dual Alliance of 1879. Specifically, the Austrian generals pressed their German counterparts to accept clear Russian preparations for war as a casus belli. Their concerns found support in Germany. Moltke’s deputy and designated successor, Quartermaster-General Alfred von Waldersee, shared with Holstein an ultimately pessimistic view of the prospects for retaining Russia’s good will. By November, he and his aged superior were agreed on the military advantages of a preventive war, to be launched during the winter of 1887.37

  Bismarck rejected this concept out of hand. He insisted that provoking a war was directly contradictory to German policy. More to the point, he was unwilling to surrender the making of that policy to military considerations. Nor was he standing alone. Bernhard von Bülow, the future chancellor, at the time secretary in the German embassy to Russia, spoke during the winter for common sense. Should war be fought, Bülow declared, it must be a war to the finish, a war which would cripple Russia for at least a quarter-century. He described the Russians as more fanatical, more capable of sacrifice, and more patriotic than the French. For victory to be permanent, for Russia to be incapable of taking revenge, her black-earth provinces must be devastated, her coastal towns bombarded, her commerce and industry crippled. She must be driven from the Black and Baltic Seas. Ultimately, she must be deprived of her western provinces. To do that would require a sequence of victories carrying German troops to
the Volga—an eerie prefiguring of events in 1942. Given the obvious difficulties of winning such victories, Germany was far better advised to get along with her eastern neighbor.

  And there lay the rub. It took two to agree, but only one to quarrel. Bülow went on to castigate the weakness and stupidity of Russian government circles, the systematic poisoning of public and political opinions against Germany. Should Germany ever stand alone, Russian would immediately join with the French against her. Any promises to the contrary would be swept away by the tides of Panslavism and Germanophobia. The real guarantees of peace were armed force and alliances, particularly the alliance with Austria. Germany could expect favorable results only from a policy of mistrust expressed in the most determined terms.38

  Like other war scares before and since, that of 1887 blew over almost as rapidly as it emerged. But Bülow’s letter reflected a changing attitude in German politics. Even those refusing to follow Holstein in regarding the tsar’s empire as an implacable foe were beginning to concede a level of inevitability in Russo-German tensions that was foreign to Bismarck’s argument that only interests, not friends or enemies, were eternal.

  Military considerations sharpened the anxiety, especially for Waldersee, who finally succeeded Moltke in 1888. The new chief of staff’s image as a Russophobic political general should not obscure the reasonable questions of strategy and operations that influenced his views on broader issues. The East, Waldersee had declared in 1884, was a far more dangerous theater for Germany than the West. Not only was the road to Berlin virtually without natural obstacles, but every yard of ground abandoned meant the loss of historic Prussian territory to an all-destroying enemy.39

  The existing war plans developed by Moltke depended on Russian cooperation: specifically, Russian readiness to deploy substantial forces in the Polish salient, exposed to an Austro-German pincers. Since the 1880s, in an effort to counterbalance Germany’s advantage of rapid mobilization, almost half the Russian army had been concentrated in the empire’s western military districts. A British war office report circulated in January, 1893, highlighted the fact that in the previous decade the garrisons of those military districts not on the European land frontier had remained almost the same size. In Kiev, Vilna, and Warsaw, on the other hand, the garrisons had been augmented by 124 battalions, 148 squadrons, and 61 field batteries.40

  These formidable forces were not projected to remain obligingly in place. The Russians had become sufficiently aware of German intentions to have altered their own. Rather than holding forward positions, their main armies now expected to retreat eastward, drawing their enemies after them. Waldersee’s initial response was a strategy of hot pursuit, with one German army attacking south into Russian Poland towards the Narew River, and another, smaller force advancing east across the Niemen River, on towards Kovno and Vilna. The new plan was risky at best, involving as it did movement in diverging directions against superior forces. It left almost no margin for human error or acts of God. In particular, Waldersee fretted about the possible impact of weather conditions on his projected offensive. Mud would slow the German infantry. It would immobilize the artillery whose firepower was regarded as an indispensable counterweight to Russian numerical superiority. By the end of his term in offfice Waldersee was even suggesting that should war begin during the wet season, Germany might be better advised to reduce its forces in the east in favor of the west until the weather changed. The rain clouds on the chief of staff’s horizon foreshadowed a basic change in Germany’s plans for the contingency of a two-front war.41

  Meanwhile, Russian relations with France steadily improved in the financial and military spheres. French bankers, eager to take Germany’s place exploiting the Russian market, negotiated in the summer and fall of 1888 a major conversion loan giving Russian credit a much-needed boost. The respective general staffs were also beginning a series of systematic exchanges. Widely publicized improvements in French organization, armament, and training during the 1880s did not go unnoticed in a Russia increasingly dubious of Germany’s probable attitudes in any European conflict. French generals for their part were all too aware of the enduring weaknesses of even their revamped military system. A Russian connection seemed to promise a quick fix, as opposed to dreary efforts to overhaul the army in the face of successive governments unable to pursue any policy over a long term.42

  Bismarck’s resignation on March 18, 1890, marked a watershed in German-Russian relations. The Reinsurance Treaty expired in June. Kaiser William II, logically enough, turned over the negotiations for its renewal to his new chancellor. Leo von Caprivi had no experience in foreign affairs. He had never even seen the texts of the treaty—hardly the best preparation for dealing with Holstein and his allies in the foreign office, who immediately sought to change the kaiser’s mind. They described the Reinsurance Treaty as conflicting with Germany’s other agreements, above all the Austrian alliance. Bismarck, the critics asserted, had been able to keep his complicated diplomacy alive because he was Bismarck. His reputation was such that even his follies were taken for wisdom. No successor could expect to have anything like the same status—or if it came to that, the same mind-set, with its enthusiasm for keeping a half-dozen balls in the air simultaneously. Clear-cut, unmistakable policies were preferable for a new administration under a young ruler.

  Caprivi knew his own limitations. He was reluctant to assume Bismarck’s mantle and risk keeping apparently conflicting commitments to five powers at once—particularly in the context of the domestic conflicts that had been the immediate cause of Bismarck’s downfall and now demanded prompt attention. Responding to the overwhelming advice of his counsellors, William informed Giers that the recent changes in the government impelled Germany to avoid far-reaching commitments, at least temporarily. The Reinsurance Treaty would therefore not be renewed, but Russia could remain assured of Germany’s friendship and good offices.43

  Giers, shocked and upset, did everything in his power to change William’s mind. His desperation was enhanced by his isolation. Russia’s current chief of staff argued that the Congress of Berlin should have been lesson enough that Russia’s most dangerous enemy was not the one who fought her directly, but the one who awaited her weakening to dictate terms of peace.

  A government’s policy is not always best evaluated by the opinion of its generals. But in March, 1892, Tsar Alexander suggested to a shocked Giers that a major order of Russia’s business in any future war would be to correct the error of German unification by breaking up the Reich into a number of small, weak states. Such attitudes, expressed not in journalistic or academic circles, but at the highest policy-making level, suggest that Germany was not exactly abandoning a willing partner—unless “willing” be interpreted as an equal desire to embrace or to annihilate the object of one’s affections.44

  Nonrenewal of the Reinsurance Treaty was not an overt step towards considering alliances in terms of their value in preparing for war, as opposed to sustaining peace.45 Holstein warned consistently against fatally alienating Russia at the wrong time by challenging her too sharply in a specific situation. Better by far to contain her through a structure functioning without Germany’s direct intervention. Rejection of the Reinsurance Treaty had been a necessary taste of the stick. Now, Holstein argued, it was time for carrots—trade agreements, political concessions, perhaps even a new treaty. But all must take place within the status quo.46

  Russia was in no position to issue direct challenges to any of the great powers. Her sponsorship of the Hague disarmament conference of 1899 reflected more a general consensus of the state’s military backwardness than an altruistic concern for international order. Russian military appropriations had the highest growth rate of any European power during the 1890s. After 1892 Russia consistently outspent France; after 1894 Germany too fell behind the tsar’s empire. But though Russia did move increasingly toward self-sufficiency in arms production, on the whole the amount of security purchased did not match the actual outlay of r
ubles. This reflected less internal inefficiency and corruption than the sheer size of the Russian military establishment—almost a million men during the 1890s, as opposed to the half-million or so kept with the colors by France and Germany. Russia’s extensive frontiers, the lengthy period of active service considered necessary to train peasant conscripts for modern war, and the slow mobilization imposed by an underdeveloped transportation network combined to generate a conviction that Russia needed the largest peacetime army she could possibly support. This in turn meant more money spent on maintaining the structure than improving it.47

  It was scarcely surprising in this context that Russian relations with Germany remained if not consistently warm, at least generally harmonious. French capital might dominate the official money market, but German investment in railroads and industrial enterprises steadily increased. German consumer goods made headway everywhere in Russian markets. Periodic vitriolic outbursts from Moscow or St. Petersburg over the inequities of the economic relationship were by this time familiar enough to be overridden. Where it counted the governments were well able to cooperate.48

  Nor was Holstein’s conviction that Imperial Russia and Republican France could sustain anything but the most fragile relationship directly disproved by the course of events. The first official French references to an “alliance” with Russia were made only in 1895. Not until 1897 would a Russian tsar acknowledge the treaty in public—and then it was Nicholas II, who in 1894 succeeded a father never proud of his French connection.

  The new Russo-German relationship represented a significant departure from the direct influence Bismarck consistently sought to exercise. But restraints can be no less binding for being relatively loose. The possibilities of integrating Russia into a flexible network of diplomatic relationships seemed enhanced as France’s moderate attitude suggested the survival, or perhaps the rebirth, of that Concert of Europe Bismarck had done so much to demolish. Holstein and his colleagues in the foreign office were by no means hostile to the concept. A Europe subdivided into rigid alliance systems offered too little scope for the exercise of the diplomatic talents on which they prided themselves. Inflexibility bade fair to neutralize the economic and military strength, the geographic position, and not least the mixed form of government that, in the minds of Germany’s leaders, gave her such advantages as mediator and pivot point of an open international order. As early as 1895 Holstein asserted that “the Russians will need us before we will need them.”49 Germany could safely afford to wait for her eastern neighbor while preserving as far as possible a free hand towards the rest of the world.