by Hew Strachan
The army was also uncertain about where the BEF would operate. As in the French case, this was at least in part a product of intelligence about German strength and German intentions. Sir James Grierson, the director of military operations in 1905, had been persuaded that the Germans would attack through Belgium. The attractions of dispatching the BEF to Belgium were threefold. First, Antwerp would provide a secure base of operations, enabling direct maritime links with Britain. Secondly, by operating against the Germans’ right flank the BEF might have greater effect than its small numbers would otherwise achieve. Thirdly, the British command would be independent of that of France. By 1908, however, the general staff had begun to move in favour of supporting the French left. Belgium’s own desire to remain unequivocally neutral made the development of the Belgian option not only complex but possibly even (if the Germans respected Belgian neutrality) redundant. Nonetheless, direct support to France, although adumbrated before 1910, was not fully developed until Wilson’s appointment in that year. Wilson’s overriding object was to ensure that Britain, although not formally committed to France, in practice found that it was. His method of achieving this aim was to present detailed proposals, to narrow the discussion to their implications, and so avoid debate on the general policy. Acceptance of the detail created acceptance of the policy.
The meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence on 23 August 1911 is illustrative both of Wilson’s approach and of much of the spuriousness which it cloaked. Wilson argued that the Germans would enter France between Verdun and Maubeuge, and that the thirteen roads available in this sector would allow the Germans to commit there forty of the seventy divisions which they would deploy in the west. Reckoning France’s contribution to the defence of the area at thirty-seven to thirty-nine divisions, he concluded that the swift commitment of the BEF’s six divisions could save France. To present a neat argument, Wilson begged two questions—the size of the German army and the direction of its advance. Privately, Wilson reckoned the Germans would use their reservists from the outset, would denude their eastern frontier, and would therefore commit to the west a total of eighty-four divisions, not seventy. It followed, not only that the British contribution would not swing the balance so neatly, but also that the Germans were likely to come north of Maubeuge and the Meuse. Wilson was convinced of this latter point in 1910, but from April 1911 brought his thinking into line with France’s 3eme bureau, and rebutted suggestions by Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, and General Sir John French which did no more than reflect his own earlier convictions. The intelligence and operational conclusions on which Wilson was relying were, to all intents and purposes, French.50 Thus, a congruity emerged which subordinated Britain’s strategy to France’s.
Although it would be foolish to pretend that Wilson’s was not the most effective and decisive voice in British strategic counsels before 1914, it is important to recognize that it was not the only one. Wilson did not enjoy a status comparable with that of Moltke or Joffre; he was not, as they were, the chief of the general staff and the putative commander-in-chief. That office was held, from 1912, by Sir John French.51 French was a short, white-haired cavalryman, who had made one reputation in South Africa and another in ladies’ bedrooms. It is not irrelevant to his strategic thinking to note that he had commenced an abortive career in the Royal Navy, and that he had never been to the Staff College. The status of the general staff within the army, given its novelty as an institution (it was formed in 1906), deprived it of the commanding influence it enjoyed in Germany. The new policies with which it was associated had to compete with the weight of the army’s established experience and long-received wisdom. The application of a general staff to a bewildering variety of unpredictable colonial campaigns, and the relevance of continentalism to a tradition of imperial service or European amphibious operations, were moot points. French himself was not of the general staff or particularly appreciative of it. Admittedly, his views moderated after 1912. He even warmed to Wilson, a man he had hitherto distrusted as a protégé of Lord Roberts. But he never came completely to terms with the subordination of the British army to French planning and French strategy. The Belgian option favoured in 1906 lived on in French. His was the initiative to renew approaches to Belgium in 1912, and to consider the possibility of landings at Zeebrugge, Ostend, and Antwerp. The attractions of a Belgian strategy were not simply the desire to pursue a role independent of the French, but also its conformity to more traditional British strategic assumptions. By placing itself athwart the Belgian coast, the BEF would be both contributing to the defence of Britain against invasion and creating the possibility of joint operations with the Royal Navy. Although French’s thinking did not appeal to Wilson, it did attract Asquith. The commitment to France was not a foregone conclusion by 1914.52
Therefore, although Wilson’s advocacy of swift support for France did determine the nature of British strategy for 1914, and consequently for the war as a whole, it did not do so until after war itself had been declared. The cabinet and the government did not address the issue, and the army was in no state to speak coherently. The Curragh ‘mutiny’ in March 1914 had led to the resignations both of the secretary of state for war, J. E. B. Seely, and of French. In July the position of the former was temporarily held by Asquith, that of the latter by Sir Charles Douglas. Wilson, himself an Ulsterman and a key, if shadowy, figure in the Curragh incident, embraced the prospect of war as a way of shelving the Irish home rule issue and of mending the divisions in the army. But his advocacy of direct support for France, conveyed to the Unionists and indirectly to The Times, still did not constitute policy. When, on 3 August 1914, the army received its mobilization orders, they made no mention of how it was to be employed. Only the previous day the cabinet had emphasized that the tasks of the BEF were home and imperial defence.
Asquith’s decision, taken late in the evening of 4 August, to appoint Lord Kitchener to the War Office had the merit of éclat, but did not clarify the situation. Kitchener was a serving soldier, not a politician; his reputation had been made in the Sudan, in South Africa, and in India, and he was already en route for Egypt when he was recalled to London. He thus laboured under a double disqualification for the office which he now entered—an office which he did not wish to occupy, and which his cabinet colleagues had little desire to bestow on him. But Haldane, Asquith’s natural choice, did not enjoy popular approval, being seen as a Germanophile, whereas Kitchener did. Whatever the constitutional improprieties of a soldier holding cabinet office, the appointment gave the Liberal administration an aura of professional military competence which earned widespread public approval. Much of what Kitchener did in his two years at the War Office was disfigured by his mistrust of his colleagues, his doubts about their ability to keep confidences, his reluctance to work with the idea of collective responsibility, and his undermining of the War Office’s procedures through his own imperial and proconsular habits. But failures in administrative methods are not the same as defective policy. Some of what he did in the latter area was bad, but not half as bad as the memoirs of those politicians who survived the war, especially Lloyd George, suggested. Above all, Kitchener realized from the outset that a European war would be a long one, perhaps lasting three years, and that as the exiguous BEF was Britain’s only combat-ready army its immediate use to support the French should be balanced by its need to underwrite the formation of a truly continental-sized British army.
Kitchener’s views on the use of the BEF were not so unorthodox as Wilson’s single-minded advocacy of French strategy suggested. On 4 August Haldane, imagining that he would return to the War Office, considered holding the BEF back to allow it to become the nucleus of a larger army. Douglas Haig, who when director of military training in 1906–7 had worked closely with Haldane and had come to admire the Swiss nation in arms, was of a similar opinion: he felt that the war might last for several years, and that the army should reckon on being expanded to a million men.53
On 5 August a
war council was held to decide the issue of the BEF’s employment. Kitchener, Haldane, and Haig were all present. But so too was Wilson. Although he did not speak, his conviction that the war would be short, and that, if British aid to France was delayed, it would be too late, forced them to compromise on their long-term views. Sir John French, now named as the BEF’s commander, revived the Belgian option, suggesting that Antwerp be used as a base and that the BEF operate on the German flank. Both banks of the Scheldt downstream of Antwerp were Dutch. But the fact that the Royal Navy could not have defended Antwerp without breaching Dutch neutrality as surely as the German army had breached Belgium’s worried nobody—least of all Churchill. The First Lord of the Admiralty quashed French’s proposal on the grounds of practicality, not international law: he announced that the navy could not support operations based on a port so far north. French earned a double penalty: he had thoroughly alarmed both Wilson and Haig, who would be subordinate to him in the field, and he found himself responsible for the execution of a strategy which was not his own. The war council agreed that the BEF should go to France. The most significant single strategic decision taken by Britain in the war was thus in the first instance reached not by the cabinet, but by an ad hoc committee convened by the prime minister and dominated by the army.
Churchill had said that the navy could protect Britain from invasion, and that therefore all six divisions were free to go to the continent. Others were less sure. Offers of service from Canada, New Zealand, and Australia were accepted; India was asked to send a division to Egypt and to hold another in readiness; but none of these troops was immediately available. Kitchener, despite Churchill’s assurance, remained concerned about home defence, and was also, of course, anxious to retain the nucleus for a greatly expanded army. Asquith was worried about public order: the fears that the loss of overseas trade would cause both large-scale unemployment and a fall in food stocks combined with recent experience of trades-union militancy to make a case for keeping back two divisions. At a second meeting of the war council on 6 August Kitchener announced the cabinet’s decision that only four divisions and the cavalry division would go immediately; the fifth might follow in the near future, but the sixth would stay at home. The withdrawal of troops from South Africa was designed to offset in some measure the outflow.
The pre-war staff talks had concluded that the BEF would concentrate in the area Le Cateau-Maubeuge-Hirson, thus extending the French left-wing opposite the Belgian frontier. From the outset Kitchener was unhappy with the choice. He favoured a concentration much further back, at Amiens. This would not disrupt the shipment of the BEF to Rouen, Le Havre, and Boulogne, or the arrangements for its transport in France, but it would preserve its freedom of action and leave it less exposed. Kitchener had seen the collapse of the French armies in 1870; he had no desire for the BEF to be swept up in comparable disasters. Furthermore, he early on developed a sense of the true direction of the German advance. The Germans, he felt, could only have decided to attack Liege and to accept the involvement of Britain in the war if a sweep north of the Meuse was integral to their war plan.
Sir John French too favoured Amiens. Henry Wilson did not, and set about working on French. He was supported by Victor Huguet, France’s liaison officer, who reflected Joffre’s worry that if the BEF concentrated as far back as Amiens it would upset the forward deployment of the entire allied left wing. On 12 August one of Kitchener’s acolytes, the military correspondent Charles Repington, argued in The Times that the main weight of the German advance lay in Belgium. But at a meeting on the very same day the BEF’s concentration was once again brought forward to Maubeuge. Kitchener waived his reservations for the sake of alliance solidarity. British strategy was being subordinated to alliance politics, while British policy was being overborne by French strategy. Britain’s entry to the war had been determined by Belgium and the balance of power in Europe; the disposition of its army was being settled by the French general staff.54
It was not just Britain’s deployment area that worried Joffre; it was also the three days lost in Britain’s mobilization schedule because of the cabinet’s procrastination in entering the war. The BEF might not be ready to fight until 26 August, when Joffre planned to commence operations on the 20th. In the event, the dispatch of a smaller force than Wilson had anticipated enabled time to be made up. Reservists were speedily incorporated: the 1st Somerset Light Infantry absorbed 400 men in four days. Despite the congestion to civilian traffic caused by the August bank holiday, railway movements were accomplished without major disruption. Over five days 1,800 special trains ran, and they arrived at Southampton every three minutes for sixteen hours a day. With no intelligence as to crossing dates and with its destroyers operating at their maximum range, the German High Seas Fleet could not realistically hope to disrupt the BEF’s passage.55 The embarkation began on 9 August, and was accomplished by 17 August. On 20 August the concentration at Maubeuge was complete. On the same day the cabinet offered the release of the fifth division; the sixth followed in early September, and a seventh—formed from the troops from South Africa—in the middle of the same month.
French mobilization and concentration were carried out with similar slickness: herein was the triumph of plan XVII. Beginning on 2 August, the 800,000 men of the peacetime home army absorbed 621,000 reservists into its forty-five divisions, a further 655,000 formed the twenty-five reserve divisions, and 184,000 were put into twelve territorial divisions. A further 1 million men remained at their depots. Using fourteen railway lines, each carrying on average fifty-six trains a day, the concentration was completed by 18 August. Of a total of 4,278 trains, only about twenty were late.56
Across the Rhine, German mobilization was ordered on 1 August, and as in France began on the 2nd. Some had anticipated the order. Baden had called up its reservists early, on 14 July, and for a longer period of training than usual; in Prussia, on the other hand, Walter Bloem, a reserve officer in the 12th Brandenburg Grenadiers, left his regiment on the same day, having finished his annual training commitment. Most reservists were recalled on 29 and 30 July. Only the two youngest (and therefore most recently trained) classes were needed by active units to reach their war strength. The older reserve and some of the younger Landwehr classes (up to age 31), with a cadre of professional officers, formed a total of 353 reserve battalions, giving thirty-one reserve divisions; the remainder of the younger Landwehr classes were formed into eighty-seven Ersatz battalions. The older Landwehr classes (aged under 39) contributed 314 battalions, and the Landsturm embraced those aged between 39 and 45.57
The first two days of mobilization were devoted to the mobilization of the railways themselves. Groener had worked hard to incorporate Germany’s civilian railway administration into the military and so make it an effective tool of the general staff. Although his planned construction programme was not complete, Groener’s administrative arrangements functioned superbly: all the railways in Germany came under his command, and his major struggles were not with civilians but with corps commanders. Each corps required 6,010 wagons, organized in 140 trains, to complete its movement. Between 2 and 18 August one train crossed the Rhine over the Hohenzollern Bridge at Cologne every ten minutes. The active corps were in position by 12 August, the reserve by the 14th, and the Ersatz divisions on the 18th.58 The 1st army (von Kluck, 164 battalions) and the 2nd (von Bülow, 159 battalions) were grouped on the Belgian frontier opposite Liege. The 3rd (Hausen, 104 battalions) and 4th (Albrecht, Grand Duke of Württemberg, 123 battalions) faced the Ardennes, down as far as Luxembourg. The 5th army (Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, 147 battalions) was in the Thionville-Metz area of Lorraine, north of the 6th (Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, 131 battalions). The 7th army (von Heeringen), the weakest of all at 108 battalions, was echeloned back and to the south, from Strasbourg down east of the Rhine.
Calculations as to the actual balance of forces in the west vary—partly according to the numbers of garrison and line of communication uni
ts included, and partly because, although the concentrations were virtually complete by 18 August, additional formations (notably two French divisions from North Africa) were still to arrive. The mobilized strengths of France and Germany were roughly comparable, just short of 4 million men each, and in the west numbering 1,108 French battalions to 1,077 German. Germany had incorporated rather more reservists, but the quality and training of Germany’s reservists were at a higher level than those of France. On the other hand, France could count on the BEF (at the outset a further forty-eight battalions) and 120 Belgian battalions. The French and the British had the benefit of more recent battle experience than the Germans, who—the Herero War in South-West Africa apart—had not fought since 1871. Both in the quality of their field artillery and the quantity of their cavalry (thirteen divisions against ten) the Entente powers could claim a superiority. The Germans, on the other hand, enjoyed better and more heavy artillery. Aggregate figures, 2 million French troops against 1.7 million German, gave a sufficiently close balance in the west to mean that manoeuvre and concentration, operational and tactical nous, might well be decisive.59