The First World War

by John Keegan

  In the period while the Great Memorandum was in preparation, Schlieffen’s presumption was correct. The French Plan XIV, completed in 1898, predicated defence of the common frontier in the event of war with Germany. A French attack was thought impossible by reason of disparity of numbers. A static French population of forty million could not challenge an expanding German population already fifty million strong, and rising fast. Moreover, the French high command was intimidated by Germany’s proven ability to enlarge its army rapidly in time of crisis by incorporation of reservists. The French reserve system had failed in 1870. The French generals of 1898 did not trust that the system would work any better in the future. Plan XIV allotted no role to separate reserve formations, Plan XV of 1903 a subordinate one.

  The problem of reserves was to afflict the French military mind throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. While the German generals wrestled with the difficulty of how numbers were to be transported at the greatest possible speed to the chosen field of action, the French agonised on how adequate numbers were to be found at all. The Conscription Law of 1905, imposing two years of military service on all young Frenchmen, without exemption, eased that difficulty by increasing the size of the “active” or peacetime army; the Law actually made the French peacetime army larger than that which Germany intended to deploy into Belgium, which brought the problem of reserves back again. A peacetime army large enough to outnumber the German army on the common frontier would still need to incorporate reserves rapidly if the front widened. In 1907 Plan XV bis allowed for a concentration of French troops against southern Belgium; two years later Plan XVI enlarged that concentration, even though the new arrangements depended on incorporating reservists whom the high command still doubted it knew how to employ carefully. By 1911 fears of a large German offensive through Belgium, reinforced by massive reserves, were becoming acute and a new French Chief of Staff, Victor Michel, proposed a radical departure from the strategies of Plans XIV–XVI: all available reserves were to be amalgamated with the active units, and the army was to be deployed on mobilisation along the whole French frontier from Switzerland to the North Sea.34

  Michel’s plan mirrored, though he could not know it, Schlieffen’s; it even proposed an offensive into northern Belgium which would have met Schlieffen’s “strong right wing” head on; with what results cannot be guessed, though surely not worse than those produced by the totally different French war plan of 1914. Michel, unfortunately, was a military odd-man-out, a “Republican” general whose politics were disliked by his fellows. He was soon ousted from office by a new right-wing government. Plan XVII, which came into force in April 1913, reversed his scheme. The amalgamation of reserve with active units was set aside. The deployment northwards to the sea was curtailed, leaving only the left-hand Fifth Army to deal with the danger of a German advance through northern Belgium from a position opposite southern Belgium. Most important, the operations on the common frontier were designed to be offensive. “Whatever the circumstances,” Plan XVII laid down, “the intention of the commander-in-chief is to advance with all forces united to the attack on the German armies”; that meant an attack into Lorraine, the “favour” Schlieffen doubted France would grant.35

  There were several reasons for the adoption of Plan XVII, the brainchild of Michel’s successor, Joseph Joffre. One was an absence of any firm assurance by the intelligence services that the Germans would indeed risk anything as strategically problematic and diplomatically reprehensible as a drive through northern Belgium; given the intense secrecy which surrounded all contemporary war planning—but also the blinkered refusal of the French Second (Intelligence) Bureau to recognise the clues—such intelligence was not easily to be had.36 Another was the anxiety induced by Germany’s response to the French Two-Year Law of 1905; in 1911–13 it passed conscription laws of its own which sharply increased the size of its peacetime army.37 Those measures, and Germany’s known ability to deploy reserve formations at mobilisation, put a premium on using the strength of the French peacetime army as forcefully as possible, before the reserves of either side could come into play. That meant attacking, and attacking at a point which the Germans must defend and where they could be found quickly, which was across the common frontier. Moreover, France had responded to the German conscription laws of 1911–13 by another of her own, extending service to three years; this Three-Year Law of 1913, though it could not compensate for the growing preponderance of German armies over French, did increase the size of the French peacetime army, while automatically reducing that of the reserves, thus reinforcing the argument for immediate offensive action in war. A final reason for the adoption of Plan XVII was supplied by the developing relationship between France and her associates. Since 1905 the British and French general staffs had been in active conclave. By 1911 there was between them a firm understanding that in the event of Germany’s violation of the Anglo-French-Prussian treaty of 1839 guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality, a British Expeditionary Force would take its place on the French left, an understanding which palliated, if it did not solve, “the Belgian problem.” The two countries had hoped for more: that Belgium would allow one or the other or both to advance troops on to its territory if Germany threatened. Both had been rebuffed by the Belgian General Staff—the rebuff to France was an additional reason for its adoption of Plan XVII—but France could draw comfort from the British commitment of support. Though the two countries were bound by no formal treaty, the French generals had learnt that “when [their] staffs agreed upon something, action followed.”38

  It was precisely because “such was not often the case when the French and Russian experts”—whose governments were indeed allied—“settled upon a plan” that the French generals believed the Plan XVII offensive to be a necessity if Russia were to lend the help France would need at the outset of a German war.39 Russia’s strategic difficulties both resembled and differed from those of France. Like France, it would be slower than Germany to utilise its reserves in a crisis. Its initial operations would therefore also have to be mounted with the active army. Unlike France, which had simply failed to fix upon a satisfactory scheme for integrating its reserves with the peacetime army, its difficulties of reinforcement were more geographical than organisational. It was the vast distance between population centres within Russia and their remoteness from the border with Germany which would delay deployment to the front. Yet those distances were also an advantage to Russia, since the dimension of space is also one of time amid the urgencies of war. Russia would not be pressed, in the crisis of mobilisation. It would accept an initial loss of territory while it rallied its army, something France could not afford. Of that France was acutely aware. Plan XVII was therefore justified in one sense because the great battle it was designed to provoke would buy time in the east; it was motivated, in another sense, by the need the French felt to convince the Russians at the outset that the struggle was one of life and death. The bigger and quicker the crisis, the greater the danger to France, the sooner the subsequent threat to Russia and therefore the more imperative the need for it to march rapidly to the help of France also.

  Yet Russia had a reputation for dilatoriness. It rightly exasperated the French generals. Bad enough that their Russian equivalents were secretive and often unbusinesslike, in contrast to the British, who inspired confidence even though they were not formal allies; worse was Russia’s evasion of fixed commitments. “Before 1911 the Russians had, despite continual French pressure, refused to promise more than unspecified offensive action by the twentieth day of mobilisation. In late 1910 even this minimum expectation was shaken when St. Petersburg withdrew several units from Russian Poland and the Tsar met with the Kaiser at Potsdam.” It took new staff talks, convoked by a thoroughly alarmed Joffre in August 1910, to win from General Sukhomlinov, the Russian War Minister, an assurance that the Russian army would “undertake some offensive action on the sixteenth day in the hope of tying down at least five or six German corps otherwise em
ployable on the western front.” The assurance was still only verbal. The French had no written guarantee that the Russians would do what they said, indeed no clear impression even of what action the Russians contemplated.40

  The Russians were not wholly to be blamed. The first decade of the century was for them a time of troubles, revolution at home, defeat in war with the Japanese in the Far East. The war left the state in poverty, defeat the army in disarray. The years 1906–9 were those in which the Schlieffen Plan would have worked, for the Russians hoped at best, in the event of conflict, to stand on the strategic defensive, a posture that would have given France no help at all. By 1909 they had recovered enough to write a Mobilisation Schedule, Number 18, which at least included provision for an offensive, though only after a pause to cover the concentration of reserves and to identify whether the main threat was poised by Germany or Austria. In June 1910 the Russian staff had become more positive. Mobilisation Schedule 19 accepted that Germany would be the chief enemy; still, the plan would also have abandoned most of Russian Poland to the enemy. That prospect outraged the commanders of the western districts, whose role had long been that of engaging the Austrians. Further debate within the general staff ensued, over the relative weights of what was operationally possible, what was owed to Russia’s traditional commitments in south-eastern Europe and what was due to the French alliance. The outcome was a compromise, known as Variants A and G to Schedule 19, A for a main effort against Austria, G against Germany.41

  Variant A, had the French known of it, would have confirmed their worst fears. Fortunately for them, in the same month, August 1912, that the Russian General Staff completed the drafting of the two variants to Schedule 19, they were able to extract from General Zhilinsky, the Russian Chief of Staff, a promise that his army would attack Germany with at least 800,000 men—half its peacetime strength—“after M + 15,” fifteen days from mobilisation.42 The promise was made specific—“on” rather than “after” M + 15—in Article III of the Russo-French Military Convention of September 1913. This sudden show by the Russians of wholehearted commitment to their ally has been explained in a variety of ways. One is that by 1913 the Russian army had largely recovered from the chaos into which it had been thrown by defeat at the hands of the Japanese; a new scheme of spending, Sukhomlinov’s “Great Programme,” promised positive improvement and actual expansion within four years. A second reason, it has been suggested, was misleading intelligence. In 1913 Russia had an “agent in place,” the Austrian Colonel Alfred Redl, who had sold them the plans for his army’s mobilisation, plans which appeared to minimise the dangers foreseen in Variant A. “A third explanation for Russian conduct was the weight of the [French] alliance … If France readily fell to the Germans, the Russians had little confidence they could hold against the combined hordes of Germany and Austria-Hungary … Russia and France either rose or fell together and … Russia should strain to the utmost in meeting its obligations, even to the point of conducting offensive operations at M + 15.” Finally, there is the suggestion that the Russian generals abruptly closed their minds to the dangers into which an offensive, rather than a self-interested but safe defensive war would lead them. In that, however, they differed from the French and the Germans only in the lateness of their decision to gamble.43

  If Russia alarmed France by prevarication and procrastination in the years 1906–14, so did Austria her German ally. The two countries, enemies in the war of 1866 which had given Germany the leadership of Central Europe, had made up their differences by 1882. The alliance then signed, however, contained no military provisions. Bismarck, Germany’s Chancellor, sagely shrank from the danger of involvement in Austria’s manifold internal and external difficulties, among which the antagonism with Ottoman Turkey was age-old, the quarrel with Italy over lost Venice but recently papered over, the designs of Serbia and Romania on Habsburg lands inhabited by their minorities strong and growing. There were informal explorations of respective strategies between the two general staffs, nonetheless; Austria learnt that, in the event of a two-front war, Germany intended to defend against France, attack Russia; Germany learnt with satisfaction that Austria would attack Russian Poland. There things rested. The Austrian staff found Schlieffen, when he came into office, “taciturn” and “hardly forthcoming.”44 It was not until after his retirement that productive negotiations commenced, in January 1909.

  Moltke the Younger, German Chief of Staff, knew what he wanted. The Schlieffen Plan lay in its pigeonhole. It required of the Austrians the largest and speediest deployment possible against Russian Poland. The initiative for the talks, however, had come from his Austrian opposite number, Conrad von Hötzendorf, then alarmed at a threat of war not with Russia only, but her protégé, Serbia, also. There were other fears. Italy was not a reliable ally, nor was Romania. He saw a web of combinations and eventualities, none favourable to Austria. The worst eventuality was that Serbia might provoke a war with Austria-Hungary, in which Russia would intervene after the Habsburg army had deployed the weight of its forces in what would then be the wrong direction, south to the Danube instead of north to Poland. The solution he suggested was the division of his army into three at mobilisation: a Minimalgruppe Balkan of ten divisions, to deploy against Serbia, a Staffel-A of thirty divisions for the Polish theatre and a Staffel-B of twelve divisions, to act as a “swing” force reinforcing either, as need be.

  The scheme offered little to Moltke and on 21 January he wrote to better Conrad’s terms. Dismissing Austrian fears of Italian or Romanian falseness, he assured Conrad that the war in the west would be over before Russia could fully mobilise and that Germany would by then have sent strong forces to the east; but he gave no timetable, an omission to cause Conrad anxiety, since he had a two-front war of his own to plan. On 26 January he warned Moltke that Germany could not count on the transfer of Minimalgruppe Balkan to Poland before fifty days from mobilisation. Could Germany guarantee to send support within forty days? If not, he had better stand on the defensive in Poland and destroy Serbia in an all-out offensive. The destruction of Serbia was Conrad’s real desire; like many German-Austrians, he detested the small Slav kingdom, not merely because it failed to show due deference to Austria’s unofficial imperium over the Balkans but also because it was a magnet of attraction to dissident Serbs within the Habsburg empire. A victory over Serbia looked to be the surest solution of Austria’s general difficulties with its other Slav minorities.

  Moltke replied with a mixture of assurances and dismissals. The French could not delay German reinforcements more than four weeks—the Schlieffen Plan, to the details of which Austria was not privy, reckoned six weeks—so that it was perfectly safe, as well as essential, for Austria to attack Russia in Poland; and, even if Austria found itself committed to a Serbian war, it would not be let down by Germany; as to Serbia, the problem “will solve itself for Austria as a matter of course.” Conrad noted: “Certainly: but what am I to do if already tied down in Serbia?”45 Since the Austrians outnumbered the Serbs by sixty divisions to ten, twice the proportion conventionally reckoned necessary for victory, Conrad might be reckoned timorous. His army could not be beaten by the Serbs, even if he committed only Minimalgruppe Balkan against them. Moltke, above all concerned to arrange that Russia should also have to fight on two fronts—a Polish western front where the Germans would be temporarily weak, a Polish southern front where he hoped the Austrians would be strong—stifled any irritation Conrad’s prevarication provoked and he promised almost by return of post to join with Austria in an offensive: “I will not hesitate to make the attack to support the simultaneous Austrian offensive.”46 That was a promise he should not have given and could not certainly make good. The Schlieffen Plan, indeed, stipulated that the fraction of the German army left in East Prussia while the great western battle was fought should stand on the defensive. He apparently gave the promise in good faith, nonetheless, and the letter of 19 March 1909 in which it was offered remained the understanding between the
two allies in the years that followed. Conrad, whose bellicosity brought about his removal from office in November 1910, found that it still lay on file on his re-appointment a year later. When he and Moltke had their final pre-war meeting at the holiday resort of Carlsbad in May 1914, the German Chief of Staff responded to the Austrian’s request for the commitment of additional troops in the east, with the vague assurance, “I will do what I can. We are not superior to the French.”47 Schlieffen’s pigeonholed plan, drawing the trace of a “strong right wing” on the map of northern France, had insisted otherwise; but he had counted on a firmer Austrian will and feebler Russian power.

  What he had not counted upon was the intervention of the British. Schlieffen’s Great Memorandum alludes to the possibility; an appendix of February 1906 discusses its import, but with the presumption that they would do no more than land at Antwerp, or perhaps on Germany’s North Sea coast. There was no apprehension that they would place themselves in the French line of battle at a point to impede the German advance through Belgium. Since military conversations between France and Britain, an outcome of the agreement of entente cordiale in April 1904, did not begin until December 1905, the month in which the Great Memorandum was finished, he had no indication that they might. Moreover, the British, even while they opened their discussions with the French, themselves remained in two minds over what they should do with their army if it were committed to the continent. There was indeed the possibility of an amphibious operation, one the Royal Navy favoured as a means of forcing out the German High Seas Fleet to give battle.48 That, on the other hand, was a “strategy of diversion.” The universal military mood called for a “strategy of concentration” at the decisive point. The decisive point, in a war in which Germany was the attacker, would lie in France and it was there, in progressive stages, that the British General Staff agreed with the French an expeditionary force should be committed. In April 1906 the Committee of Imperial Defence drew up plans to send troops directly to the Low Countries. There was then a lapse of five years, brought about by Belgian unwillingness to admit a British army and by French inability to design a convincing war plan. All changed in 1911, with the appointment of Joffre as French Chief of Staff, Henry Wilson as British Director of Military Operations. Joffre was formidable, Wilson dynamic. When they met for the first time in Paris in November, Joffre unveiled the outlines of Plan XVII.49 Wilson, in August, had already outlined to the Committee of Imperial Defence how best a British Expeditionary Force might be employed, small though it would be, for spending on the navy and the country’s continued resistance to conscription allowed it to keep an army of only six divisions at home. Those six divisions, by operating against the German right wing, might tip the balance by forcing the Germans to divert strength to deal with it. “The larger the force detached by the Germans from the decisive point,” Wilson argued, “the better it would be for France and ourselves.” He proceeded to the detailed planning of how most quickly and efficiently the expeditionary force could be transported across the Channel, with the active co-operation of the navy, which supported a speedy operation that would then leave it free to concentrate on tempting the German fleet to decisive action. The British were nevertheless cautious. Ardently Francophile though he was, Wilson succeeded in denying to the French any specific indication as to where the expeditionary force would take the field, right up to August 1914, while it was only in November 1912 that the French extracted from the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, something like a commitment to common action.50 “If either government,” the letter read, “had grave reason to expect an unprovoked attack by a third Power, or something that threatened the general peace, it should immediately discuss with the other, whether both Governments should act to prevent aggression and to preserve peace, and if so what measures they should take in common. If these measures involved common action, the plans of the General Staffs would at once be taken into consideration, and the Governments should then decide what effect should be given to them.” The principle of splendid isolation, for all the dangers offered by diminishing economic power and growing German naval strength, could still cause Britain to hesitate at binding herself to an ally.