To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  On 6 August 1914 the newly appointed secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener, received parliamentary approval for an increase in the army of 500,000 men. This was the first of his ‘New Armies’; by mid-August he was aiming for four such armies, giving him twenty-four divisions in addition to the six formed by the existing regular army. Between 4 and 8 August a total of 8,193 men enlisted; in the second week of the month 43,354 came forward, and in the third 49,982. With the news of the battle of Mons and the retreat to the Marne, and press reports of the exhaustion and disarray of the exiguous British Expeditionary Force, recruiting in the final week of August reached 63,000, and in the first week of September 174,901. By 12 September 478,893 men had joined the army since the war’s outbreak, and 301,971 since 30 August. Of a total of 5.7 million who served with the British forces in the First World War, 2.46 million were to enlist voluntarily by the end of 1915.168

  Two features are immediately striking in these figures. First, popular enthusiasm was clearly transformed into active service; secondly, the process by which it did so was delayed in its operation. All classes responded positively to Kitchener’s appeal. However, the professional and commercial classes did so disproportionately: over 40 per cent of those eligible in both categories joined the army, thus suggesting that their exposure to the influences of the press, to the appeal to escape the office routine of bourgeois life, was not without its effect. By contrast, only 22 per cent of those in agriculture enlisted, and they constituted 8.4 per cent of all recruits. The agricultural workforce was older than many other occupations, and its contribution to the war effort was direct, but in addition it was cut off from many of the influences of popular nationalism. The methods of recruiting employed in rural areas were traditional and paternalist, relying on a sense of deference and obligation rather than on regional links and bonds of friendship. In Sussex such techniques were insufficient.169 In the Highlands of Scotland the sparseness of the population underlined the impossibility of adhering to strictly territorial recruiting. Cameron of Lochiel recalled emigrants to Scotland. Macdonald of Clanranald appealed to the memory of the 1745 rebellion, citing the Hanoverian (i.e. British) army’s treatment of the Jacobites as evidence of German brutality.170 Just under 30 per cent of those employed in manufacturing industry enlisted. It is possible that high working-class enlistment in August and September was related to unemployment. The immediate effect of the war’s declaration was an increase in unemployment by 10 per cent: 78 per cent of Birmingham recruits in August came from the same social classes as before the war, and by September nine out of ten unemployed were reported as having enlisted. As a general pattern, therefore, industrial and urban areas produced more recruits than rural areas. By 4 November 1914 237 per 10,000 of the population had volunteered from southern Scotland, 196 from the Midlands, and 198 from Lancashire; by contrast the west of England had mustered only eighty-eight per 10,000, the eastern counties eighty, and southern Ireland thirty-two. Urban civic pride became a powerful factor and was embodied in the idea of ‘Pals’ battalions, units made of up friends, linked by professional, recreational, or educational ties: 145 service battalions and seventy-nine reserve battalions were raised locally. The ‘Pals’ movement was particularly strong on Merseyside, and comparatively weak in Scotland. The big exception, Glasgow, raised three battalions for the Highland Light Infantry, the 15th battalion from the corporation’s tram service, the 16th from the Boy’s Brigade, and the 17th from the city’s chamber of commerce. Typical of a community cut off from such collective influences, from the excitement generated by the press and the parades, was Gwynedd in north-west Wales. Perplexity at the war, the lack of military traditions, the separateness from England, all combined to produce low rates of recruiting.171

  Some of the factors experienced in Gwynedd were common to Britain as a whole, and help explain the slowness with which recruiting boomed in August. Ernest Jones wrote to his friend Sigmund Freud on 3 August that, ‘London is absolutely quiet and indistinguishable from other times except for the newspapers’.172 The Liberal press concluded, once war was declared, that it had no option but to support the national effort. With no immediate danger to Britain, the prevailing mood was one of obligation. Reservists reported for duty almost without exception. But others had to put their affairs in order; there were delays in sorting out separation allowances for their families; and their employers were reluctant to lose them.

  Within a month many of these factors were operating in the other direction. Women distributed white feathers to those not yet in uniform; employers promised to keep jobs open for men on their return. Britain’s delay was evidence of a general European phenomenon. The speed of the crisis had changed war from a remote contingency to an immediate actuality: people took time to adjust. The attempt by international socialism to prevent the war and the obvious manifestations of bellicosity were more sequential than they were simultaneous: the failure of the first created the opportunity for the second.

  The enthusiasm with which Europe went to war was therefore composed of a wide range of differing responses. Its universality lay in their convergence and not in their component parts. Intellectuals welcomed war as an instrument with which to change pre-war society; many of those who joined up did so to defend it. For the latter, the foundations were as much psychological as ideological: community and conformity gave shape to lives disordered by the upheavals which the war caused.173 The common denominator may more accurately be described as passive acceptance, a willingness to do one’s duty; enthusiasm was the conspicuous froth, the surface element only.

  The mood relied in large part on an ignorance of the conditions of modern war. The bulk of popular literature continued to portray war as a matter of individual courage and resource, to use imagery more appropriate to knights-errant and the days of chivalry. ‘Where then are horse and rider? Where is my sword?’, Wilhelm Lamszus had asked ironically in Das Menschenschlachthaus (the slaughterhouse of mankind), published in 1912. Like H. G. Wells in Britain, Lamszus had recognized that the next war would represent the triumph of the machine over human flesh.174 But the inherent optimism of the human condition, the belief that the best will occur rather than the worst, the intimations of immortality to which youth is subject, persuaded many that technical progress would make war less lethal, not more so. The Breisgauer Zeitung assured its readers on 1 August that their chances of coming back in one piece from this war were greater than in previous wars. The modern battlefield was much less bloody because of the extended distances at which fighting occurred. Moreover, high-velocity bullets were of smaller calibre and therefore passed through the body with less damage. Such wounds as were inflicted could be rapidly treated thanks to the advances of modern medicine.175 British regular soldiers who had served in South Africa did not share the general exuberance; recent knowledge of war—in their case that with Japan in 1904—may also have contributed to the reluctance of Russian reservists.176 But in France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary no such experience of combat could clutter their idealized views.

  Popular enthusiasm played no part in causing the First World War. And yet without a popular willingness to go to war the world war could not have taken place. The statesmen had projected internal collapse as a consequence of prolonged fighting. Instead, the societies of all the belligerents remained integrated until at least 1917, and in large part into 1918. The underlying conviction of the war’s necessity, of the duty of patriotic defence, established in 1914 remained the bedrock of that continuing commitment.

  3

  THE

  WESTERN FRONT

  IN 1914

  WAR PLANS

  Probably no single episode in the military history of the First World War attracted so much controversy in the inter-war years as the events of the first six weeks on the western front. The Germans had come—or so it seemed— within a hair’s breadth of defeating France. For the French it had been a pyrrhic victory. Defeat was averted, but the Germans had overrun France’s ind
ustrial heartlands and had conquered sufficient territory to be able to determine much of the strategy of the rest of the war. Nonetheless, France’s officers squabbled as to whom among their commanders, Joffre or Gallieni, best deserved the title of victor. What dogged the German generals was not comparative success but ultimate failure. The first objective of their memoirs was to disown responsibility for Germany’s inability to achieve a quick victory; the second, to deny that they had been defeated at all.

  After the armistice in 1918 the German army was anxious to consolidate its argument that it was not responsible for Germany’s final collapse. Its case rested not simply on its interpretation of the events of the war’s last year but also on those of 1914 itself: the fact that the war in the west had not been won in short order, as had allegedly been promised, was the fault—it was argued—of a handful of individuals, and not that of the army as a whole. In 1930 General Wilhelm Groener, the head of the railway section of the German general staff in 1914, stated that the legacy of Schlieffen as chief of the German general staff was to ‘point his successor on the path to victory in the battle of Germany against an enormous superiority in numbers’.1 Groener and others, notably Hermann von Kuhl and Wolfgang Förster, characterized the war plan drawn up by Schlieffen as containing the perfect operational solution to Germany’s dilemma of a war on two fronts. By electing to concentrate first against France in the west, and by achieving victory in six weeks, Germany would be ready to turn east against Russia before the latter could be sufficiently mobilized to bring its strength to bear. The initial campaign in the west was the nub of this strategy. The German army was to pivot on its weaker left wing in Alsace-Lorraine, sending its stronger right wing swinging through Belgium to envelop Paris, cut the communications of the French, and then roll their armies up against the frontier. Groener’s argument that Schlieffen’s genius for operations had correctly divined the solution to a seemingly intractable problem was embraced by writers outside Germany. Liddell Hart used all his considerable powers of metaphor—likening the balance between the two wings to ‘a revolving door’2 —to conjure up what was a totally false image of the problems of manoeuvring a mass army. For Groener and Liddell Hart, what went wrong was that Schlieffen retired in 1905. The plan that was implemented in 1914 was one weakened by the emendations of his successor in office, Helmuth von Moltke the younger.

  Liddell Hart, who probably did not know better, and Groener, who certainly did, grossly distorted the methods by which the German general staff evolved its war plan. By 1913 up to 650 officers were employed on the ‘great general staff’, making it one of the major institutions of the Wilhelmine state. Theirs was a continuous task of analysis and revision: for this there was an annual cycle incorporating staff rides and war games. Whatever was planned for 1905 was specific to that year; it was an incremental evolution from the plans of previous years, and it was not a definitive statement, intended to remain unchanged over subsequent years. It contained at least two different options, one for application only in the west against France, and another for use in the event of having to fight on both fronts simultaneously. The interaction between these two possibilities was contingent on the diplomatic situation, and on the strengths and mobilization schedules of Germany itself and of Germany’s two potential enemies. Consequently, the initial phases of a war, those of mobilization, concentration, and deployment, attracted the bulk of the planners’ attentions. The propositions which the process threw up were contingent and conditional. There was no single solution, no one plan.

  The ‘Schlieffen plan’ acquired its status for two reasons. The first was historiographical: the desire of the German army in the 1920s to persuade itself that it had had the means to win the war. The second was Schlieffen’s own influence as a teacher and guru, which survived both his death in 1913 and the First World War. In practice, however, we know less about the planning process of 1905 itself than almost any other year of Schlieffen’s tenure of office. Germany’s actual war plans were, of course, by their very nature, highly confidential documents. The Reichsarchiv historians seem to have been very cautious in their use,3 and in 1945 they were destroyed by British bombing. The so-called ‘Schlieffen plan’, published for the first time in 1956, is nothing of the sort. It is a memorandum written for his successor and for the war minister, which survived because it was kept by Schlieffen in his private papers. Its very location suggests that it was not drafted as an operations order, and such a supposition is confirmed by its layout and style. Ostensibly written in December 1905, the last month of his service, it was probably actually written in the following month, after he had retired. It is dramatically different from the other surviving document of December 1905, the conclusions which Schlieffen drew from his last war game. The first paper, the ‘Schlieffen plan’, seems to have been written at least in part in order to argue for increases in the strength of the army, a cause which the general staff would return to with greater success in 1912 and 1913. The pursuit of resources was as much Schlieffen’s purpose as the pursuit of victory, and he therefore focused on the planning option which would make his case with the greatest force. Reconstructing the evolution of the German general staff’s thought, and consequently the German army’s intentions in 1914, is more fraught than much recent historical writing allows.4

  MAP 3. THE WESTERN FRONT

  The central dilemma for German planning was the difficulty of defending its western and eastern frontiers simultaneously. Although acute in 1914, it had preoccupied the senior von Moltke even before the Franco-Prussian War. The protracted French resistance of 1871 suggested to him that a victorious campaign in the west could not be settled sufficiently quickly to allow the possibility of dealing with first one opponent and then the other. As a result of the war Germany had acquired Alsace-Lorraine as a strategic glacis. The elder Moltke expected the French to attempt to regain the lost provinces, but also saw them as Germany’s best line of defence. Operationally, his inclination was to ride a French offensive and then counter-attack, or to defend in the west while conducting offensive operations in the east. He did not expect such a war to produce a complete German victory, and he ominously referred to the historical analogies of a war lasting seven or even thirty years.

  Moltke’s immediate successor, Alfred von Waldersee, moved away from these cautious responses in favour of offensives on both fronts, to the west as well as to the east. Two factors shaped this shift. First was the German army’s conviction, established in 1870, that man for man, and corps for corps, it was better than the French army. This remained a fundamental assumption up to— and beyond—1914.5 It suggested to Waldersee that, if the French attacked in order to regain Lorraine, they would create opportunities for Germany to stage a counter-offensive. Second was the growing importance of railways to the making of strategy. The possibility of mounting simultaneous or nearly simultaneous offensives on two fronts emerged from the flexibility conferred by an increasingly sophisticated railway network. By using interior lines, Germany could switch troops from east to west and vice versa, so transforming its central European position from a liability to an advantage. The benefits were primarily defensive, but they were shoehorned into an offensive framework conditioned by the determination to seek battle and therefore to concentrate mass on the decisive spot. The greater railway densities of western Europe acted as a pull in establishing the priority of that front over the east. Furthermore, the centrality of railways conferred an additional advantage for staff officers anxious to manage and limit the uncertainties of war: the military travel plan created standard operating procedures, so making strategy the servant of technology.

  Thus, when Schlieffen, who had been Waldersee’s deputy, succeeded him as chief of the general staff in 1891 a reorientation in planning assumptions was already under way. The conclusion of the Franco-Russian military convention in 1892 confirmed Schlieffen in his decision that Germany should concentrate against France first. His initial plan, that for 1893–4, allocated forty
-eight divisions to the west and fifteen to the east. Schlieffen never abandoned planning for war against Russia, but in his western variants he increasingly left the eastern front to the attentions of Austria-Hungary. His difficulty was how to give his scheme operational expression.

  Three factors conditioned both his calculations and those of his successor. The first was numerical inferiority: although Germany had pioneered the application of the short-service conscript army in peacetime, France went further in its application and acquired in Russia the European power with the largest manpower potential as its ally. The second was the speed of mobilization and concentration. France had done so much to improve on its lamentable performance in 1870 that it was clear it could achieve both ahead of Germany. And the third was the impact of the firepower revolution in offensive operations.

  Schlieffen saw clearly enough the tactical nature of modern war: the development of firepower would force infantry to entrench and to use cover, and frontal attacks would degenerate into protracted battles that would produce only limited victories. The erection of fortifications by both France and Russia on their German frontiers seemed to make the prospect of a rapid campaign against one and then the other even more remote. A general staff study of 1895 concluded that a German attack in the direction of Nancy had no prospect of achieving a quick, decisive victory. Schlieffen’s answer was not to confront France’s fixed defences, but to go round them: he began to explore the idea of an offensive directed against the enemy’s flank and rear. His aim was to achieve both a local superiority in manpower and a decisive victory in short order. The plan of 1897 pushed elements of the German army north of Verdun. The 1899 plan, in the variant which assumed an attack in the west only, proposed to turn the French by pushing through the Ardennes. Schlieffen was nervous about the implications. If the French army mobilized faster, his right could be isolated and crushed. One solution was to be ready to respond to the French redeployment to the north with his left in the south. Both elements in such a riposte— the emphasis on the counter-offensive and the readiness to switch from an attack on the right to one on the left—remained present in his considerations up until 1905. The alternative approach was to strengthen his right. This was the line advocated by General Hans Beseler in January 1900. The deployment plan for the west in 1900–1 increased the right flank to three armies, while the centre armies south-east of Metz were given the task of fixing the French in Lorraine. Metz itself was not the hub of a great wheel to the north and west, but the base for German thrusts designed to tie the French down and to split them between north and south. In the 1904 staff ride Schlieffen divided his attack— the right wing advancing between Trier and Aachen, and the left between Metz and Strasbourg. The key battles were in the centre, and the task of the right was therefore to march south—not west—in order to support the German centre and left by entering the battle on the frontiers from the French rear. The result of the exercise was indecisive: the left encountered the French who pushed forward from their defensive positions, while the right was insufficiently strong to avoid becoming embroiled in frontal battles.