The War that Ended Peace

by Margaret MacMillan

  Schlieffen’s plan was complicated in its details, involving as it did millions of men, but simple and bold in its concept. He would pour armies into France and defeat the French in under two months. The traditional invasion route into France (or route out, in the case of French troops) was in that part of France between the borders of Belgium and Luxembourg in the north and Switzerland in the south. The French loss of its two eastern provinces of Alsace and Lorraine had not changed that; indeed, it had given France a slightly shorter and straighter border to defend. Schlieffen ruled out that route. The disposition of the French armies and their war games showed that they would be expecting an attack in that direction. France, which had a long tradition of fortress building, had also reinforced its new border with two lines of 166 forts and put another ring of forts around Paris as well.12 In 1905 the French parliament voted a further large sum to strengthen its frontier forts. That left Germany, if it chose to fight an offensive war, the option of coming at France on its flanks, either in the south through Switzerland – which had the disadvantage of being mountainous and prepared to defend its passes – or the Low Countries of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg with their flat terrain, good roads and excellent railway networks. The choice of the northern route was easy. Schlieffen determined on a giant flanking movement down into France to catch the French armies in a trap, just like Sedan.

  In the event of war, some four-fifths of Germany’s army would move west while the remaining fifth fought a defensive action against Russia in the east. In the west the attacking German armies on the great right wing, facing westwards out from Germany, would sweep through the Low Countries, with, as the saying had it, the sleeve of the German soldier furthest on the right brushing the Channel, and down into France towards Paris. The much smaller German left wing to the south of the great fortress at Metz below Luxembourg would confront the French armies in their expected attack. As the plan developed it became more elaborate and more rigid; by 1914 the German armies were expected to be in Paris forty days after the start of hostilities. If the French did as expected and attacked across their shared border into Germany, they would be moving further away from the main battlefields. When they realised that the main German attack was approaching in the west behind their forces, the French, it was hoped, would be demoralised and caught in confusion as they tried to switch troops from their thrust into Germany to meet the challenge in the west (itself a dangerous move because they would still have the German left wing to their east). If all unfolded as it should in the Schlieffen Plan, the main French armies would be caught between the two wings of the German forces and surrender. In the meantime, the much smaller German force in the east would stand on the defensive waiting for the slow Russian mobilisation and expected attack westwards. By the time the Russians could approach the Germans in any numbers, the war would be over in the west and German troops could be sent eastwards to deal with them.

  Schlieffen simply ignored or brushed away the broader implications. Under his plan, a conflict with Russia would automatically trigger a German offensive against France. (And the likelihood of such a conflict was growing in the first decade of the new century as Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary was increasingly at loggerheads with Russia in the Balkans.) Schlieffen did not allow for the possibility of France choosing to stay neutral, whatever its treaty with Russia said (and France was only bound to come to Russia’s aid if Russia were the innocent party). Furthermore, German troops would invade three small countries with which they had no quarrel. In the case of Belgium Germany would also be breaking an international undertaking which it had inherited from Prussia to respect Belgium’s neutrality. Since Britain was one of the other signatories to the original treaty, it might well feel that it had an obligation to enter the war against Germany, a prospect which became more real as its relations with Germany worsened and Britain drew closer first to France and then to Russia. The Schlieffen Plan, and in this it remained the same until 1914, virtually ensured that Germany would fight on two fronts, thus risking a more general war.

  In 1913 Moltke narrowed Germany’s options still further by putting an end to the general staff’s only alternative to the Schlieffen Plan, the Eastern Deployment Plan, which provided for a conflict with Russia alone, with France remaining neutral. And even if France had chosen to come to the aid of its ally, the Germans could have fought defensively in the west. The general staff, however, seems to have thought that too much time and effort was going into drawing up plans for a war which did not promise quick results. In 1912 a German war game confirmed this view: Germany’s main offence against Russia ended inconclusively when the players taking the Russian role retreated into the interior of Russia.13 So in the crisis of 1914, Germany had just one plan; whatever France chose to do Germany was going to attack it if threatened by a Russian mobilisation. A war which started in the east would almost inevitably spread to the west with whatever consequences that might follow.

  There was a further risk built into German war plans which increased the likelihood of war. Of all the European mobilisation plans, the German was the only one that flowed seamlessly through from the first notices calling the armies up to war itself. By 1914 Schlieffen’s heritage had produced a highly complex mobilisation process with eight clear stages. The first two warned the military in confidence that a state of tension existed so that they could take appropriate measures in preparation for mobilisation, such as cancelling leave. The third stage, the ‘imminent threat of war’, was to be announced publicly and the third and lowest category of reserves, the Landsturm, called up so that the higher level of reserves were ready to join the regular armies. Stages four and five were the actual mobilisation of Germany’s forces as troops assembled in their units and were sent by trains to their designated places on the frontiers. The last three stages moved the troops from their trains into the ‘attack march’ across the borders and then to the final stage of the attack on the enemy.14 The plans worked superbly in the summer of 1914 to that last stage of the attack. Although the troops could in theory be halted at the borders, the plans had such momentum built in that it was highly unlikely. And so the German government was deprived of the ability to use mobilisation as a deterrent or to have a cooling-off period, before the first blood was shed, when negotiations could take place.

  As Schlieffen saw it, his duty was to devise the best military plan for Germany; he left diplomacy, which like most of the general staff he saw as useful merely for preparing the ground for war, to the civilians. Yet he did not see it as his responsibility to inform them in detail of what he was planning. Nor did he or his successor Moltke co-ordinate with the navy, the Kaiser’s Military Cabinet, the commanding officers of the army corps who would be responsible for carrying out the plan or with the Prussian Ministry of War and the smaller ministries of war in the component states of Germany, which were responsible for the size of the army, its armaments and some parts of the mobilisation.15 And although both Schlieffen and Moltke felt that they did not have enough troops to carry out the plan successfully, they nevertheless stuck to it without making a strong case to the Ministry of War for expanding the armed forces or challenging the increasing sums going into Tirpitz’s navy.

  The direction of Germany’s overall strategy and the co-ordination of the key parts, both civil and military, of the government needed a Bismarck but there was no one of his stature before 1914. Bismarck himself was in part to blame for leaving behind a system where the lines of control were not clearly drawn and where there was little will to draw them. The only institution capable of providing co-ordination and overall direction was the monarchy but Wilhelm was not the man to do it. He was too lazy, too erratic and too easily distracted yet he guarded his position as the supreme authority jealously. When an admiral in the Ministry of the Navy suggested in 1904 that there should be a council including the senior army and navy leaders, the Chancellor, and the Kaiser to consider what Germany should do in case of a war simultaneously with Britain and F
rance, he got nowhere.16

  The civilian leaders, for their part, accepted the artificial distinction insisted upon by the military leadership that they had exclusive jurisdiction in all matters military, from war planning to the conduct of war itself. (This did not stop the military from intervening in areas which were not clearly military; the activities of the military attachés in Europe’s capitals who reported directly back to their superiors in Berlin had long been a problem for the German diplomatic service.) Even when the decisions being made by the military had political or international impact, the German civilian leaders chose to stand aside. In 1900 Holstein, still the key figure in the Foreign Office, was told that Schlieffen intended in his plans to ignore international agreements such as the one guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality. After some thought, he replied: ‘If the Chief of the General Staff, particularly such a pre-eminent strategical authority as Schlieffen, considers such a measure imperative, then it is the duty of diplomacy to concur in it and to facilitate it in every possible manner.’17 The political leadership not only abdicated responsibility; it had little idea of what the military were thinking or planning. Bethmann, the Chancellor from 1909 to 1917, said after the Great War: ‘During my entire tenure no type of war council was ever held, at which politics might have intervened in the military cross-currents.’18 The civilians would not have been supported in any case by the Kaiser had they challenged his military. In 1919, as he contemplated Germany’s defeat, Bethmann said: ‘No reasonably serious observer could have failed to appreciate with the utmost clarity the enormous perils of a two-front war. For the civilian side to have tried to foil a thoroughly thought-out military plan described as absolutely essential would have entailed an intolerable responsibility.’19

  In 1905 Schlieffen was kicked by a friend’s horse and laid up for several months. ‘I am nearly 75 years old’, he wrote, ‘almost blind, half deaf and now have a broken leg too. It is high time I take my leave and I have good reason to believe that my repeated requests for retirement will be granted this year.’20 He may have been making the best of the situation; the Kaiser, as he did so often, was losing faith in him and preparing to replace him.21 Schlieffen left office on New Year’s Day 1906. Even after his retirement, though, he continued to exert influence over the general staff whose members by and large revered him as one of Germany’s greatest generals. As German troops moved towards France in 1914, General Groener wrote: ‘The spirit of the blessed Schlieffen accompanies us.’22 Perhaps inevitably, any successor would have seemed second best and the younger Helmuth von Moltke suffered from the comparison in his lifetime and after his death.

  One morning in the autumn of 1905 Chancellor Bülow was taking his morning ride in Berlin when he ran into his old friend the younger Moltke. ‘I was struck by the anxiety in his face.’ The two men rode side by side and Moltke revealed that the cause of his concern was Schlieffen’s retirement: ‘His Majesty insists on making me his successor and everything in me dislikes the thought of this appointment.’ Moltke felt, he told Bülow, that he did not possess the right qualities for such a demanding post: ‘I lack the power of rapid decision; I am too reflective, too scrupulous, or if you like, conscientious for such a post. I lack the capacity for risking all on a single throw.’23 He was probably right but he had the burden of a great name which he felt he ought to live up to and a sense of duty. Conrad claims that Moltke told him that he warned the Kaiser not to appoint him, asking: ‘Does your Majesty really think that you can twice win first prize in the lottery?’24 Moltke nevertheless accepted the post and held it until the autumn of 1914, when he was dismissed in the wake of the failure of the German plan, which had become as much his as Schlieffen’s, to deliver victory. General Erich von Falkenhayn, the War Minister and Moltke’s successor, said cruelly: ‘Our General Staff has completely lost its head. Schlieffen’s notes do not help any further, and so Moltke’s wits come to an end.’25

  Moltke was a big, heavy-set man who looked the picture of a bold Prussian general but in reality, as his conversation with Bülow shows, he was introspective and insecure. In some ways nicer, with broader interests, than his immediate predecessor – Moltke read widely, for example, played the cello, and kept a studio where he painted – he was also lazier and less forceful. He started well enough with a step that won approval from his fellow officers: he managed to stop the Kaiser from coming to the autumn manoeuvres and causing his usual chaos. (Wilhelm was amazed when Moltke told him that his side had always been allowed to win.)26 Nevertheless Schlieffen himself and many of the senior officers saw him as an unsatisfactory choice for what was widely considered the key position in Germany. Moltke never mastered the work of the general staff in the detail Schlieffen had done and tended to let its various departments run in their accustomed fashion while he spent more time on managing the Kaiser and his Military Cabinet.27 In the opinion of both the Russian and Austrian-Hungarian military attachés in Berlin, Moltke was not up to the responsibilities of his great office. ‘His military character and technical expertise’, the Austrian told Vienna, ‘are not greater than an average officer.’28

  The new chief of staff also had a fatalism, sometimes verging on outright pessimism, about the world which was fed by his fascination with one of the new occult religions that were sweeping through Europe at the time. His wife, a woman of strong character, stronger many said than Moltke himself, was a follower of Theosophy, that jumble of Eastern religion and spiritualism founded by Madame Blavatsky. In 1907 both Moltkes became disciples of the guru Rudolf Steiner, who talked about a new spiritual age dawning on the earth. (His Waldorf schools which stress developing the imagination and creativity still flourish today, much favoured by the middle classes.) While Moltke’s wife welcomed the prospect of a new age, Moltke himself was gloomy: ‘Mankind must first go through much blood and suffering before it reaches that far.’29

  As chief of the general staff, Moltke contented himself with continuing much of his predecessor’s work. The general staff, which was a large part of Schlieffen’s legacy, continued to function smoothly. It had increased significantly during Schlieffen’s tenure in its professionalism, cohesiveness and size, from fewer than 300 officers to over 800. There was a still larger number of officers out in the field who had circulated in and out on tours of duty and as a result shared the ethos of what was said in a contemporary joke to be one of five perfect institutions in Europe. (The others were the Curia of the Catholic Church, the British Parliament, the Russian ballet and the French opera.) Staff officers, said Harry Kessler, were ‘reserved, cool, clear, hard, polite: all as if manufactured according to a model’. Dedicated, competent, hard-driving, they knew themselves to be part of an elite machine whose purpose was to ensure that Germany was prepared for war. The other key part of Schlieffen’s legacy was not a final plan but an overall strategic direction and method of planning. Year by year in the two decades before 1914, the general staff tested its plans in field manoeuvres – some with thousands of men and their equipment – war games, or on paper. All were analysed for issues, gaps, or shortcomings, and the results cycled back into the planning process. On 1 April every year, each unit of the German army had its updated plans and orders. ‘They have turned war’, Kessler rightly said of the general staff, ‘into a great bureaucratic business enterprise.’30 And, as with other great enterprises, there was a danger that process was becoming more important than broader strategic thinking and that fundamental assumptions including the need for a two-front war went unexamined and unchallenged.

  ‘If you believe the doctors’, Salisbury once remarked, ‘nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.’31 With the formation of the Triple Entente, the German general staff saw a world where an offensive war was the only way for Germany to break its encirclement. Increasingly its military leaders also came to accept the possibility, indeed the desirability, of a preventive war. ‘I consider it the duty of a responsible
politician and general’, wrote Groener unapologetically in his memoirs, ‘that when he sees a war inevitably coming to trigger it at a moment that offers the most advantageous prospect.’ In 1905, during the first Morocco crisis which came at a time when Russia was temporarily disabled, no one could guess for how long, by defeat and revolution, Germany’s top leadership, Groener and Schlieffen included, seriously considered war on Britain and France.32 The Saxon military representative in Berlin reported back to Dresden: ‘A war against the allies France and Britain continues to be regarded as a possibility at the highest level here. His Majesty the Emperor has therefore ordered the chief of the general staff of the army and the chief of the navy staff to prepare a joint plan of campaign. His Excellency Count Schlieffen is of the opinion that all available forces of the land army should be marshalled against France and that the protection of the coast should be left largely to the navy … The war will be decided in France, not at sea.’33 In subsequent crises, over the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, the second Morocco crisis in 1911, and the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 the German military leadership again considered preventive war but the Kaiser, who genuinely seems to have hoped to maintain the peace, refused to approve it. Ominously, the military grew increasingly impatient with what they saw as his weakness. War was on its way, Falkenhayn said, and neither the ‘great “peace” emperor’, nor the pacifists could stop it.34