To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  In his conclusions to the 1904 staff ride Schlieffen for the first time considered the possibility of breaching Belgian neutrality. His readiness to do so was predicated on the belief that the French would already have infringed it. His assumption at this stage was that the Belgians would join the French, but in the conclusions to his last war game in 1905 he was to argue—perhaps in response to his manpower worries—that the effect of France’s violation of Belgian neutrality would bring Belgium in on Germany’s side.6 Railway densities were a basic precondition for a strong German right wing, and Belgium’s network was indeed a lure. The head of the railway section of the general staff, Heinrich von Staabs, had encouraged increasing deployments north of the Moselle from 1903.7

  Undoubtedly Schlieffen recognized the benefits of greater radicalism in the use of the right wing. The results of a second staff ride of 1904 were not vastly different from the first, but on this occasion Schlieffen criticized his commanders for not persisting with their advance against the line Lille-Verdun. He was now of the view that by moving into open space and ignoring developments on their left, the armies of the German right wing would threaten Paris, while the French armies crossing the Rhine into southern Germany would have put themselves out of the battle. Thus, the assumptions of the December 1905 memorandum are apparent in Schlieffen’s conclusions. But they themselves had never been tested in any war game or staff ride—and significantly, the outcome of the second staff ride of 1904 was a French victory, in which the German 1st army was isolated and the bulk of the 2nd and 3rd armies encircled as they moved to respond to the invasion of southern Germany. What we know of the 1905 staff ride for the western front illustrates similar themes. Schlieffen said that the right wing would pass through Belgium, leaving Liège and Namur to its left and Antwerp to its right, and would then move on Paris from the north. But as the exercise progressed the battle was, as before, fought out around the frontiers and Metz, with the Germans responding to the opportunities created by French initiatives.

  Nothing in these exercises suggested that Schlieffen had devised a solution to Germany’s two-front dilemma. He had allocated sixty-five divisions for the 1903/4 deployment plan in the west, leaving only ten in the east, and yet had still not produced a decisive victory in short order. He recognized that in the event of an active eastern front he would have far fewer troops to play with in the west. The plans for the second deployment option, that which required simultaneous operations in the east, tended to divide the German forces in the ratio two-thirds for the west to one-third for the east. They effectively eliminated any chances of early success in the west. For all the pull of a deployment exclusively in the west, Schlieffen never ceased to update the two-front scenario. Moreover, his very last war game, conducted in November-December 1905, focused on a possible initial victory over Russia rather than France. Given his numerical inferiority, particularly when split over both fronts, his solution was to let both his enemies take the initiative and to rely on a counter-stroke for success. He deemed the chances of this to be greater in East Prussia, where the Masurian lakes provided a screen behind which the Germans could manoeuvre and where Königsberg could become an entrenched camp for the collection of an army to strike against the Russian flank from the north. Thus, in this exercise only ten corps and ten reserve divisions were directed westwards, but thirteen corps and twelve reserve divisions eastwards. These were the most the railway network could support. They were not sufficient to annihilate the Russians, but the exercise showed that they would enable a victory big enough to allow the Germans to disengage and redeploy to the west by the thirty-fifth day after mobilization. Schlieffen assumed that in the interim the French would themselves have broken Belgian neutrality by advancing along both banks of the Meuse. His aim was to move outside the French left. Resting his calculations on the assumption that Belgium would be Germany’s ally, not France’s, he planned to get three corps into Antwerp by the thirty-third day and a further three by the thirty-seventh. ‘The further west this [German] attack fell the more effective it would be, as it would threaten not only the enemy’s flank, but also his rear.’8 He argued that the French would be so preoccupied with their own plans that they would not realize the danger from the north until the thirty-sixth day, too late to prevent their being enveloped in the Ardennes.

  Schlieffen’s final memorandum, his so-called ‘war plan’, therefore takes to an extreme trajectory one aspect of the thinking he had already developed. Undoubtedly, the idea of a massive envelopment through Belgium had become stronger between 1892 and 1905, but it was predicated on an increasing readiness to make major assumptions and to take massive risks. In his conclusions to the 1905 staff ride Schlieffen bore testimony to his own recklessness. Because the German army in the west would be smaller than the French, even after the redeployment from the east, its own flanks and rear were more at risk from envelopment than were those of the French: ‘Such an action requires a focused leader, who has an iron character and who possesses a determined will to win.’9 While he was in post, this side of his thinking was held in check by the tests to which war games and staff rides had exposed it. In retirement, such balances were removed. Schlieffen’s refusal to modify his plans in the light of the resources available to Germany became more fixed. His more excessive statements about the decisive nature of envelopment and the strength of the right wing date from this period. And, unlike his war plans, they were published. Schlieffen’s main tenets—the immediate adoption of the offensive as the means to defend Germany, the decision to put the weight in the west, and the conviction that the war could be short—now became fixed. The feasibility of all three came to rest on the decisiveness of envelopment. Much of his energy leading up to retirement and after it was devoted to the acquisition of evidence to support these assumptions.

  Schlieffen saw himself as an intellectual, just as Moltke the elder had done, but he used ideas in a very different way. While he was in office the academic syllabus of the general staff was narrowed, while the span of military history which it studied broadened. This focus on concrete examples seemed to imply a more rigorous and ongoing approach to the study of war than was possible through the simple acceptance of abstract and generalized principles. But military history, initially Frederick the Great’s conduct of the Seven Years War, and especially the battle of Leuthen, and latterly Hannibal’s victory over the Romans at Cannae, was exploited to justify Schlieffen’s central propositions. In both battles inferior numbers had triumphed by bringing their weight against the flank of the enemy. But the thinking was very selective. The military historian Hans Delbrück engaged in a long-running exchange with the German general staff, contending that Frederick had fought a war of attrition, and had settled for only limited success. The failure of the two to agree arose in part because they were not comparing like with like. Delbrück was considering an entire war; Schlieffen—reflecting the whole bias of his planning activity as chief of the general staff—focused on a single campaign. In rejecting Delbrück’s interpretation, Schlieffen also limited his own understanding of future war. He saw war as a professional soldier’s activity, susceptible to rational management and fine calculation. His decision to elevate Cannae rather than Leuthen to the status of a prototype perhaps reflected his inability to come to terms with Delbrück’s more sophisticated analysis of Frederickian strategy. At Cannae Hannibal had left his centre weak, so that the Romans had broken in only to be crushed by the two strong Carthaginian wings. But there were methodological problems here too. Hannibal’s success lay in the realm of battlefield tactics; the fire-effect of modern armies might prevent the closing on the centre and front which had characterized Cannae. Furthermore, Schlieffen was endeavouring to apply precepts derived from tactics to operational strategy. Not only was the analogy incomplete, it also failed to acknowledge that, despite his victory, Hannibal had lost the war. In the context of the Carthaginian wars as a whole, Cannae was not a decisive battle but an incident in a long war of exhaustion. T
he same could be said of Leuthen. The battle of Königgrätz in 1866, in which Schlieffen himself had served, was the real—if less frequently expressed—prop to his thinking. Thus, Schlieffen’s use of history was a bogus intellectualism. On staff rides, junior officers worked through possible alternatives in their annual revisions of Germany’s war plans. In doing so, they gained a thorough training as well as an unbounded admiration for Schlieffen. But Schlieffen’s central propositions were never seriously challenged. The function of analysis was not to revise but to confirm the leading features of his thought.

  By 1905 Schlieffen had developed a view of operations where mobilization, deployment, and manoeuvre all flowed into each other. The focus of the general staff on these aspects of war elbowed out tactics, and the decline in the rotation of staff officers between general staff appointments and appointments with troops helped to widen an emerging gap between the two levels of war. Field service regulations and tactical manuals were drawn up by commissions answerable to the war minister, and training was in the hands of the commanding generals of corps areas. The day-to-day thinking of the bulk of the army on the basic grammar of warfare lay outside the competence of the chief of the general staff.10 It seemed as though what Schlieffen envisaged was a succession of engagements rather than a climactic battle. The right wing of the German army was to envelop the French left, successively forcing it back from the river lines of the Meuse, the Aisne, the Somme, the Oise, the Marne, and the Seine, preventing it from withdrawing into central France, and pushing it eastward. The purpose was the annihilation and surrender of the French army. But of this final destructive act—how, where, and when it was to take place— Schlieffen said remarkably little. ‘No order’, one officer recalled of his days at the war academy, ‘that would have been given in combat was ever discussed, hardly even a real order for combat.’11

  Some attributed Schlieffen’s departure in 1905 to his advocacy of a preventive war in the first Moroccan crisis. But he was now aged 74 and his retirement was already planned in 1904. His successor as chief of the general staff was Helmuth von Moltke the younger. Despite his pedigree, Moltke was not the obvious selection. His experience of staff-work was limited, he had been a guards officer, and his career had been at court. The choice, therefore, was very much the Kaiser’s own. Most professional observers expected Moltke to be replaced in the event of war. At times Moltke himself seemed to share this low estimation of his own abilities, and initially resisted the idea of his appointment. He combined two qualities—fatalism and intelligence—which not only stood uneasily with each other, but also were ill-adapted to the exercise of decisive leadership. His fatalism, manifested in his response to the so-called ‘war-council’ of 8 December 1912, reflected both his personal philosophy and his wider sense of the general decline of his own social order.12 His intelligence meant that he could see alternative interpretations more clearly than Schlieffen, but then, all-too conscious of their relative merits, he could not make a choice between them. ‘In my opinion,’ he told the Kaiser before assuming office,

  it is in any case very difficult, if not impossible, to picture now what form a modern war in Europe would take. We have at present a period of over thirty years of peace behind us and I believe that in our outlook we have become very unwarlike in many ways. How, if at all, it will be possible to lead as a unit the immense armies we shall create, no man, I think, can know in advance.13

  Thus, if military history played a role in shaping Moltke’s thought, its effects were more pragmatic and less idealized than in the case of Schlieffen. Increasingly, Schlieffen’s thinking was politically unrealistic in its neglect of the implications of breaching Belgian and Dutch neutrality, and militarily suspect in its attempt to plot a self-contained war right through to its final victory. After the Franco-Prussian War the older Moltke had a staff of 154 men to mobilize an army of 700,000, a railroad network of 45,000 kilometres for its concentration, and reckoned on a war that might last a year. By 1913 his nephew’s staff numbered 650 men to mobilize an army up to five times the size, with double the railway network, and yet there was talk of Germany completing a campaign in six weeks. Numbers and space were expanding, while time was contracting. Schlieffen recognized the difficulty of command in such circumstances, but his solutions—the dissemination of a common doctrine and the emphasis on prior planning—downgraded the flexibility to deal with the unexpected. The younger Moltke, on the other hand, appreciated even better than Schlieffen that no plan was likely to survive its first contact with the enemy. However, his greater realism merely confirmed his pessimism. He anticipated a long and arduous struggle. He recognized that the French could not be relied on to conform to the expectations of Schlieffen’s more grandiose propositions: in May 1914 he disarmingly told Conrad that in a war with France ‘I will do what I can. We are not superior to the French.’ Schlieffen had seen the fruit of his labours as a formula for victory; for Moltke it was a last resort.

  Symptomatic of Schlieffen’s optimism and fundamental to Moltke’s pessimism were their differing attitudes to manpower. The plan which Schlieffen outlined for the minister of war in 1905 required ninety-four divisions for its execution: Germany had barely sixty. Schlieffen squared his aspirations with reality by proposing to incorporate reservists in the order of battle from the very outset of the campaign. For Moltke such a solution was a measure of how desperate were the expedients of the 1905 memorandum. Logically, reservists required more fire-support than active troops; in practice, the reserve corps had no heavy artillery and half the divisional allocation of field artillery. When the Landwehr went off to war in 1914 it still wore the old blue uniforms and not the field grey adopted by the active army in 1910. Admittedly, even Schlieffen embraced the reservists with reluctance. It was an arrangement that affronted professional sensibilities about training and fitness; it also left the commander with no general reserve to deploy in the course of the battle, nor any fall-back in the event of a long war. Thus did Schlieffen’s preconceptions about the nature of the war interact with his planning. On mobilization in 1914 the German field army’s strength rose from 800,675 men to 2,100,000. Reservists, in addition to increasing regular battalions from 663 to 1,090 men, made up fourteen-and-a-half corps in 1914 (as against twenty-five active corps). The older categories of men (those aged 28 to 45), who formed the Landwehr, Landstürm, and Ersatz units, constituted a separate army of occupation, even less well-equipped than the reserve corps but numbering a further 1,700,000 men.

  Schlieffen would have preferred to increase the active army, but he had been opposed by von Einem, the minister of war. Some have seen this clash as the real source of the pressure for Schlieffen’s retirement at the end of 1905. Certainly the resolution of the manpower issue points to the danger of exaggerating the powers of the chief of the German general staff in peacetime. The central debate over the size of the army in peace revolved less around operational needs and more around funding, and it was the minister of war, at the interface between the army and the Reichstag, who had the major role in framing policy.

  One argument used by Einem in his opposition to the expansion of the army rested on its role as an agent of domestic order. The smaller the army, the more it could confine its recruiting disproportionately to rural areas. In 1914 only 5.84 per cent of reservists came from big cities. Thus, the army was kept comparatively free of socialism, making it a reliable tool of the established order in the event of revolution. Furthermore, a small army required a small officer corps, and it was therefore easier to sustain the latter’s aristocratic ethos. But although he played on the army’s domestic functions, Einem was not claiming that these were its principal mission. If the argument in relation to the social order had force, it was only in the context of the pace at which change was effected, not of the implementation of change per se. Headlong expansion would do more than erode the army as an instrument of counter-revolution, it would also diminish its fighting effectiveness; gradual growth, on the other hand, would
allow training and equipment levels to keep step with numerical expansion.