To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  The prime professional issue, therefore, was the need to balance quality against quantity. When forced to express a preference in 1888, Moltke the elder had opted for the former.14 By 1899 Einem was the spokesman for this view: greater mass, he told Schlieffen, was not decisive in itself but depended on the quality of its commanders. What worried him about a larger army was that the funds would not be forthcoming to ensure that it had equipment levels commensurate with its size. He would rather have more machine-guns than more men. In part, therefore, the debate was about whether the goal in the army’s expansion should be more men, or whether more armament would be a better subsititute.15

  Einem also wished to establish a steady pace in growth for parliamentary reasons. Like Tirpitz in his management of the navy’s finances, Einem viewed a fixed cycle—in the army’s case one of five years—as the best way to curtail the Reichstag’s powers of intervention. A request for supplementary credits out-with the five-year cycle might lead to annual reviews, and thus make the army’s manning and equipment levels much more volatile and much less amenable to long-term planning.16

  At first the younger Moltke embraced Einem’s position, which was of course also the one favoured by his uncle. The army’s budget increased between 1905 and 1909, but the number of men rose by only 10,000 against a possible ceiling of 80,000. Up to and including the 1911 army bill arms took priority over manpower. Thus, the chief of the general staff and the minister of war marched in step once more. But from 1911 Moltke began to call for more men, and in doing so reflected the needs of operational planning more wholeheartedly than he had hitherto. Intellectually, the position of the War Ministry was unchanged; in practice, Einem’s successor, Heeringen, prompted by Bethmann Hollweg’s anxiety to outflank the navy, was now prepared to bring the War Ministry into line with the general staff. Therefore, the 1912 Army bill increased the infantry of the active army, acknowledging the general staff’s premiss that the opening battles could be decisive.17 In the process it abandoned the evenness of the five-year cycle. Even more importantly, it subordinated financial policy to military policy. The theoretical brake on the army’s expansion— that (like the navy) it had hit the buffers imposed by the Reich’s system of taxation—was not applied; the army’s targets in 1912 and 1913 were approved before their financing had been fully resolved.18

  The net result was that the German peacetime army doubled in size between 1880 and 1913, from 434,000 to 864,000. Furthermore, the pressure for expansion overrode social conservatism. The numbers of aristocrats in the officer corps fell from 65 per cent in 1865 to 30 per cent in 1913. The general staff conformed to the main trend: by 1914 only 40 per cent of its officers were titled. Its bourgeois members included such rising stars as Groener and Erich Ludendorff, the chief of operations. Their ethos was careerist, and their allegiance to Hohenzollern dynasticism proportionately weaker. Arguably, the effects were divisive. The overall shift was offset by the concentration of nobles in certain prestigious regiments, notably the cavalry and those from Prussia, and it was these whose company the Kaiser found more congenial.19

  Moltke was not necessarily any happier. Although he was successful in getting an increase of 136,000 men in 1912 and 1913, he had asked for 300,000. The 1912 army estimates calculated that 540,000 adult males received no form of military training. Moltke and, to a greater extent, Ludendorff aspired to the creation of a true nation in arms. The worries of the ministry of war about training and equipment levels now resurfaced. In the summer of 1914 Heeringen’s successor, Erich von Falkenhayn, was prepared to accept the training of all able-bodied German males as a long-term objective, but to begin in 1916, and not to be fully implemented until 1926. He regarded heavy artillery, fortification, and enhanced levels of training as more immediate needs.20 Therefore, when war broke out, although the German army had expanded its hope of ultimate superiority still resided in its qualitative edge. Germany and Austria-Hungary could mobilize 136 divisions to 182 of the three Entente powers.

  By 1914, therefore, Moltke was no nearer the solution of the dilemma that had preoccupied his predecessor and his uncle. Although he had more men, he still did not have enough to resolve the conundrum of a threat on both fronts. His central dilemma was where to deploy the additional troops. In 1905 Russia was weakened by war and revolution. Throughout his tenure of office Moltke had to reckon on the increasing speed of Russian mobilization, and finally to come to terms with the fact that, however fast his victory in the west, the Russian army could be operational before he could turn to face it. The solution to this problem was not to jettison Schlieffen’s preference for an attack in the west first. The eastern railway network was too poor for rapid operations, and the Russians could retreat, so trading space for time. Instead, the December 1912 crisis forced Moltke to follow through the logic implicit in Schlieffen’s thinking: the Germans ceased even to update their plan for operations in the east. Increasingly, their response to Russia’s opening moves was to rely on their Austro-Hungarian allies.

  Moltke’s development of Schlieffen’s planning assumptions rested on the exercises of 1904 and 1905, and not on the December 1905 memorandum. The latter had expected the French army’s movements to conform to those of the German. It tended to assume that the French would obligingly sit in defence of their eastern frontier while the Germans bore down on their rear. Indeed, both the need for, and the rationale of, the great flank march only made sense if they did do this. Nor in the particular context of December 1905, with the Russian army disabled and thus unlikely to mount a reciprocal action in the east, was this presumption unreasonable. Schlieffen had fortified Metz and Strasbourg in order to render a French attack into Lorraine an unpromising proposition. But his staff rides had never made the same assumptions of the French as did the memorandum for the war minister. Moltke was even more persuaded that the French would not conform to a German agenda.

  He devoted more attention than had his predecessor to the collection of intelligence, and became increasingly persuaded that the French might try to seek battle in the open field and might therefore advance either from Verdun into Luxembourg or from a front between Metz and the Vosges into Lorraine. Faster mobilization and improved railway construction gave them the choice as to which it was to be. Since the planned envelopment was no more than a means to bring Germany’s greatest possible strength against the French army, and was not an end in itself, it followed that Germany’s plans must recognize and incorporate possible French intentions. If the German plan did not do this, operationally it would fail to fix the French from the front while the envelopment was effected, and it would also expose south Germany and the Ruhr to invasion.

  Evidence as to the evolution of Moltke’s exact thinking is fragmentary up until 1911–12 and virtually absent thereafter. In the 1906 staff ride he did direct his main attack in the west through Belgium, but he was unhappy with the outcome. As he believed that the French would attack in Lorraine, he reckoned that the decisive encounter would take place there before any envelopment would take effect. The main purpose of the right wing, therefore, was to counter-attack through Metz in order to take advantage of the fact that the French would have abandoned the security of their fortifications. By 1908 his expectation that the British would support the French, but that neither would be the first to infringe Belgian neutrality, pulled the possible direction of the French offensive into the Ardennes. He continued to plan on a major envelopment of the French between the Meuse and Verdun, not to push south in the direction of Paris.21 In 1909–10 Moltke provided for a new army (the 7th) of eight divisions to cover upper Alsace and so support the 6th army in Lorraine. The possibility of the 7th army transferring to the right wing was studied, but gradually became less important as the idea of a decisive battle in Lorraine gained ground. On a staff ride in 1912 Moltke planned, in the event of a French attack between Metz and the Vosges, to defend on the left until all the troops not required for the right wing could be brought south-west through Metz and on to the
French flank. Moltke was thus working a number of options into the German plan, including both a possible thrust from the centre and, more significantly, a true ‘Cannae’, an envelopment from both wings, the left as well as the right.

  The fact that Moltke had added eight divisions to the German left wing and not to the right became, after the war, the key criticism of Groener and Liddell Hart. The balance between the two wings was changed from 7 : 1 in the 1905 memorandum to 3 : 1 in the plan put into effect in 1914. Liddell Hart’s argument assumed that an army deployed the length of the German western frontier would behave as a united mass, gaining impetus on its right specifically from the weakness of its left. An army, however, is a combination of individuals, and not a weight obeying the laws of physics. None of the criticisms of Moltke’s changes voiced after 1918 were vented before 1914. The right wing itself was not quite as strong as envisaged in the 1905 memorandum, but its tasks were lighter since Moltke did not expect it to deal with Holland nor to march as far as Antwerp before it turned south-west. Ludendorff, who was responsible for much of the detail, was happy with the 1909 version. Schlieffen recognized the wisdom of what his successor had done. In 1912 he accepted that the French were more likely to mount an offensive than had been the case in 1905, and he conceded that therefore the Germans must be ready to attack and to exploit a possible breakthrough at any point along the front. The strength of the army on the right wing should be effectively double that of any other army, but its role now was to lead the whole line forward. Thus, if the 1st army was checked, the adjacent armies would be able to exploit the opportunities created by the enemy’s own move to counteract it.

  The real difference between Schlieffen and Moltke did not, therefore, lie in any differences in operational thought. The crux was Schlieffen’s inner certainty about the correctness of his own prescriptions; Moltke, on the other hand, was reluctant to be dogmatic. By trying to anticipate the options open to the French, Moltke had created a number of possibilities but no categorical plan. Schlieffen’s thinking, for all his acceptance in 1912 of the wisdom of Moltke’s emendations, still at bottom anticipated victory through the use of a strong right wing. Moltke’s plan had at least two different options—the one adumbrated by Schlieffen, and the other in which an advance through Belgium could create the conditions for success elsewhere, probably in Lorraine. Moltke was intelligent enough to see the limitations of what could be achieved. But the consequence was that he lacked convictions of his own and could not, therefore, stamp his doctrine on the minds of the general staff. Schlieffen had lived by his belief in envelopment, and his certainty that only through that could a decisive and annihilating victory be achieved. Schlieffen’s critics, and especially Schlichting and the popular military writer Bernhardi, argued that breakthrough battles would also have to be fought, that breakthrough and flank attacks should often be combined, and that therefore command should be more pragmatic and less mechanistic. Moltke recognized the force of all this. But the result was near-anarchy. The 1910 instructions for higher command sensibly recognized the fire-effect of modern weaponry in enforcing dispersion on the one hand and in favouring envelopment on the other. They therefore observed that ‘too broad a front entails the danger of a break-through, a too narrow one of becoming encircled and out-flanked’.22 By having it both ways, such efforts to define doctrine provided little indication as to how an individual army commander would respond in particular circumstances. Yet the same publication accepted that a campaign would be made up of a succession of independent corps and army battles which would combine to produce an outcome. It therefore presumed that a common approach would characterize those battles, not least to permit the supreme command to be able to coordinate them.

  Even had he wished to do so, Moltke could not have added any additional manpower to the German right wing. His chosen deployment area was too small to admit of any greater initial concentration. Schlieffen’s intention to infringe Dutch neutrality by crossing the so-called Maastricht appendix, the part of Holland which projects south between Belgium and Germany, was not acceptable to Moltke. Recognizing the possibility of a long war and the dangers of a British blockade of German commerce, Moltke appreciated the need for a friendly neutral adjacent to Germany through which overseas trade could be maintained. He therefore narrowed the point across which the right wing would advance so that it came south of Dutch territory. Directly in its path, and mastering the principal railway lines, lay the Belgian fortress of Liege. The corollary, therefore, of Moltke’s decision to respect Holland’s neutrality was the need to seize Liège before it could delay the German advance. Much of the urgency with which Moltke pressed mobilization by 30 July derived from the necessity, dictated by his own war plan, to attack Liège by the third day of mobilization.

  German self-interest, not an enlightened approach to international rights, determined Moltke’s decision to revoke Schlieffen’s intention to invade Holland. Similar considerations prevailed in regard to Belgium. Schlieffen’s conviction, that if the Germans did not violate Belgian neutrality the French would, was widely shared in Germany. The general staff was genuinely surprised that its invasion of Belgium should have become a casus belli for Britain. Moltke recognized how important Belgian neutrality was to British interests, but had assumed that what would determine Britain’s behaviour was not Belgium but its commitment to France. The stronger the Entente seemed— and the 1911 crisis confirmed its resilience—the more the breach of Belgian neutrality became militarily necessary but diplomatically unimportant. It would be the act of war between France and Germany which would bring in the British, not the passage of the German army through the Low Countries.

  Therefore, although they both hoped that the British Expeditionary Force might be depleted by the needs of imperial security, neither Schlieffen nor Moltke was in much doubt about its commitment to European land operations. In the main, they correctly assumed that it would be deployed alongside the French in Belgium and northern France, but they also considered the possibility of its use in support of maritime operations by landings either in Jutland or on the Scheldt and Rhine estuaries. Indeed, the latter eventuality would confirm what for them would be the more serious consequence of Britain’s entry to the war, the superiority of the Royal Navy over the German. Uncertainty with regard to even local maritime supremacy was itself one rationalization for mastering the Low Countries. In its presumptions as to Britain’s intentions the German general staff showed how it projected its own strategic outlook, its cavalier approach to the question of neutrality, on to its opponents.

  German war plans, therefore, went through a progression, from Schlieffen’s allegedly taking little account of French intentions to Moltke’s taking too much. Both chiefs of the general staff have consequently been criticized, albeit on diametrically opposed grounds. French planning moved through a similar sequence, but in reverse order. France’s military inferiority in the 1870s placed its army’s calculations as to German intentions at the heart of its planning effort. However, with increasing confidence, and particularly with the national revival after 1911, the French general staff argued that by taking the initiative it could force conformity to France’s will. Thus, as in the German case, the mood for a defensive strategy transformed itself into an operational offensive. But, even in the context of relative optimism, France’s generals never completely lost sight of the fact that, if war came, its purpose would be to defend their nation against Germany. Therefore, gaining assertiveness did not blind French planners to the need to take account of Germany’s intentions. Even so, the French got it wrong. They failed to realize the extent of Germany’s proposed swing through Belgium. In part this was a product of their own assumptions. However, just as importantly, it was also a natural result of any objective consideration of intelligence on the German army. The significance of the German right wing is clear in hindsight. But in the decade immediately before the war the Germans debated the strength and the roles of both wings; and it was on the left win
g that reinforcements were placed. The fact that the French themselves planned with more attention to Lorraine than to Belgium was both a product of their own proclivities and a fair reflection of the state of the German railways, the disposition of the German army, and the politics surrounding Belgian neutrality.

  The development of French war plans between 1871 and 1914 is an excellent illustration of how long-term capital investment can determine the direction of strategy. The possession of plant forces any shift in policy to be incremental and gradual rather than fundamental and revolutionary. The defence of France planned by General Séré de Rivières in the 1870s rested on the creation of a series of forts between Verdun and Toul. Gaps north and south of these points were designed to channel any German attack, where it would be met by mobile forces able to strike against the German flanks. Major railway construction, begun in 1877, was to enable the concentration of fifteen army corps on the German border by the twelfth to fourteenth day of mobilization. A total of 166 forts, forty-three secondary works, and 250 batteries had been completed by 1884, at a cost of 660 million francs. But within a year the development of the high-explosive shell, which with a delayed-action fuse could penetrate before it detonated, challenged the construction principles on which Séré de Rivières’s system rested. The response to the new artillery, including the use of reinforced concrete and armoured cupolas for the guns, added considerably to the cost of fortification. Conveniently and simultaneously, French strategic thought shifted, Georges Gilbert criticizing forts on France’s frontiers as equally useless whether to the conduct of major battles or as havens in the event of defeat. After 1888, therefore, the French narrowed their efforts to the improvement of the forts of Verdun, Toul, Épinal, and Belfort: by 1914 not even a quarter of the defensive perimeters of these four had been fully modernized. But, both in 1914 itself and in 1916, France would derive considerable benefit from the forts and from the railway communications linking them to Paris. And, in the immediate term, by the mid–1890s a system of defence had been created that was sufficient to convince Schlieffen that a German attack from Lorraine across France’s eastern frontier would be an unprofitable business.23