To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Contacts between the two general staffs were resumed, on Conrad’s initiative, during the Bosnian crisis. Moltke revealed to Conrad Germany’s intention to concentrate against France first, but the context and manner in which he did so did not challenge the assumptions within which Conrad was planning. Conrad’s specific worry in January 1909 was that if Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia, Russia would come to Serbia’s aid. Moltke was able to reassure him that in these circumstances Germany would support Austria-Hungary. Thus, the major conclusion which Conrad drew from the 1909 exchange was that if an Austro-Serb clash led to a European war, Austria-Hungary would be supported by Germany and therefore could continue to concentrate a major part of its forces against Serbia. Moltke promised that the German 8th army in East Prussia would draw in the Russians because the Russians would be committed by their alliance with France to attack Germany. He reckoned that it would then take three weeks to defeat the French if they obliged Germany by attacking and four weeks if they cleaved to the security of their fortifications. Ten days would be required to shift the German forces to the east. Since, at the outset, Conrad had promised an Austrian attack into Russian territory by the twenty-second day of mobilization, Moltke’s proposed timetable was perfectly acceptable. Both chiefs of staff recognized the danger that Austrian troops might be embroiled in Serbia before the war had been declared against Russia or France, but Conrad still assured Moltke that he would be able to push twenty-eight divisions into Poland.

  Conrad had not secured German backing without paying a price, but the price was one which appealed to his strategic imagination. Moltke was increasingly anxious about the security of East Prussia. Schlieffen had argued that the Masurian lakes would divide a Russian advance into two eccentric directions. By operating offensively on interior lines, and so exploiting their railways, the Germans could—despite an absolute inferiority—achieve local successes. However, the 8th army would be made up of a maximum of thirteen (and perhaps only nine) divisions, and its prospects for continued use of the offensive-defence were not good. Schlieffen conceded that it might eventually have to fall back behind the Vistula, and even the Oder, until it was reinforced from the west. Militarily this plan, advanced by Schlieffen and embraced by Moltke, made sense; politically its implications were horrific. In order to accomplish its offensive in the west, the German general staff was prepared to abandon a large slice of its own country to Russian invasion.15 Thus Moltke’s quid pro quo in 1909 was a request that Austria-Hungary draw the Russians away from East Prussia by launching an attack into Poland from the south, between the Bug and the Vistula. To get Conrad’s agreement, Moltke promised that the Germans—once reinforced from the west—would also drive into Poland, from the north and the River Narew. This prospect—the confirmation of a massive Austro-German envelopment designed to destroy the bulk of the Russian army, a ‘super-Cannae’ in the east—was irresistible to Conrad. The 1909 exchanges therefore managed to keep both sides’ illusions intact. Conrad made an Austrian offensive against Russia conditional on the promise of German support, and Moltke, desperate to be relieved of his worries about East Prussia, could only agree. The proposed envelopment in Poland, the apparent evidence of unity, was not subject to detailed operational planning.16

  In reality, German thinking about the eastern front underwent a complete revolution between 1905 and 1914. In 1905 Germany’s emphasis on the west reflected Russian weakness; Moltke’s 1914 plan, which gave even less attention to the east, did so not because of Russia’s weakness but because of its strength. Moltke’s Russophobia was in large part self-induced: his response to a worsening balance of forces in the east was finally to abandon (in April 1913) any plans for attacking the Russians first and to reduce yet further the forces allocated to the east’s initial defence. The outcome of the Balkan wars was to lessen the likelihood of Romanian support for the Triple Alliance, and to remove Turkey’s value as a counterweight to Russia. The Russian decision to concentrate its western armies not in Poland, but further to the east, on the line Kowno-Grodno-Bialystok-Brest-Litovsk, was known to the Germans in 1913 and made nonsense of the proposed Austro-German envelopment.17 In any case, Moltke’s recognition of the likely complexities of the war in the west included the realization that Schlieffen’s intention of having twenty-two divisions moving east by the 27th day of mobilization was absurdly optimistic.18 Therefore, on 10 February 1913, with that mixture of realism and desperation typical of him, he told Conrad that the struggle between Germany and France would be ‘the centre of gravity of the whole European war, and consequently the fate of Austria will not be decided on the Bug, but definitely on the Seine’.19 The relative strengths of the two alliances in the east meant that he could not afford to believe anything else. In May 1914 he calculated that German troops would not begin a switch from the French front until seven weeks after the start of operations, or, in other words, up to ten weeks after the opening of hostilities.20 Although Moltke expected war to be the result of a crisis in the east, his plans focused on the west.

  But Conrad elected not to hear him. After the war Conrad repeatedly emphasized that his allies had failed him, that he was led to expect German support within six weeks and an envelopment battle as the opening (and probably concluding round) of fighting in the east. In reality, Moltke’s concession of 1909 was palpably the direct product of Conrad’s own demands. Thereafter Moltke’s own needs meant that he could only modify, but never overturn his promise. Significantly, its strongest subsequent endorsement came in November 1912, when Conrad had been replaced as Austrian chief of the general staff by the more cautious Schemua. Moltke’s vulnerability in the east meant that he could not risk the danger that there would be no Austrian offensive at all. He therefore emphasized Germany’s support for its ally in the event of a Russian threat, and said that its own attack would not be ‘hesitant’ but ‘a powerful one’ in parallel with Austria-Hungary’s.21 In contrast, two months later, on 24 January 1913, by which time Conrad had been restored to office, Count von Waldersee, a close associate of Moltke and the putative chief of staff to the 8th army in East Prussia, was more ambiguous. Conrad claimed that Waldersee had strengthened the impression that the Germans would attack in the east, and that their right wing would be directed on Warsaw and would extend to Siedlitz. Waldersee insisted that he had outlined this attack, not as the first phase of operations in the east, but as a subsequent one. Moltke’s own words to Conrad of 10 February 1913, only just over a fortnight later, serve to confirm Waldersee’s account.22

  Conrad’s real problem was that the offensive interpretation of his defensive task, given the rising strength of the Serbian and Russian armies, and the acceleration in Russian mobilization times, looked increasingly impossible to fulfil. The deployment plans of the Austrian army by 1914 suggested that if there was talk of a joint envelopment, it was a manifestation of weakness not strength—a lure for the German southward thrust on which the Austrians were becoming increasingly dependent.

  Conrad calculated that he would need twenty divisions to defeat Serbia, leaving a minimum of twenty-eight to go to Galicia. He therefore organized his army in three parts. Eight divisions, forming the 5th and 6th armies were to go to Serbia, this being sufficient to hold the empire’s south-eastern frontier. The 1st, 3rd, and 4th armies, a total of twenty-eight divisions, were to go to Galicia. The balance of twelve divisions, the 2nd army, was to constitute a reserve, to go to Serbia if Russia did not support its Balkan ally and to go to Galicia if it did. The main Galician group would be concentrated between the fifteenth and nineteenth days of mobilization. However, the 2nd army’s mobilization and concentration would be both separate and later. In the event of war with Russia, it would not arrive in Galicia until between the twenty-first and twenty-fifth day. Austria-Hungary could not begin active operations in Galicia until after then. Moltke warned Conrad that Russia’s mobilization was becoming faster, and in February 1914 correctly calculated that two-thirds of the Russian army would be mobilized b
y the eighteenth day, not the thirtieth as in the past. To this information was added intelligence suggesting that the Russians now planned to concentrate their forces further forward, west of the Vistula, so as to give more direct support to France and possibly also to prepare for the opening of a central front in Poland.

  The major danger now facing Conrad was a rapid Russian advance to the Vistula and the envelopment of his armies on their western flank. He, therefore, knowingly forfeited his ambition to anticipate the Russian concentration. Rather than take the initiative, and hope to deal with Russian units piecemeal, he elected to stand back.

  By March 1914 his intention was to place up to thirty divisions on his left wing, on the San, ready to push north; his right, reduced to only ten divisions, had to conform and bring its concentration back to the line of the Dniester. A number of arguments supported this move. Most pressing, but particularly embarrassing, was the probability that the details of the previous deployment plan had been betrayed by Colonel Alfred Redl, a homosexual general staff officer who had shot himself in 1913. Treason of a different sort also confronted Austria-Hungary in Galicia: there were growing indications that Romania would not declare common cause with Vienna, and might even join the Entente. By refocusing the plans towards the north and west, the Austrian right flank was less exposed to the south and east. The Russians would now have further to advance, and so would exhaust their strength before making contact. The Austrians themselves would be holding a front of 340 kilometres rather than 440, and so would require fewer infantry divisions. Moreover, a decision about whether the 2nd army should be deployed against Russia or Serbia could now be left until the fifteenth day of mobilization.

  But balancing the advantages were a range of potential penalties. The Russians would have more time and space in which to complete their mobilization, deployment, and concentration. For the Austrians all three phases faced considerable challenges. First, the new plan, drawn up in March, was due to be tested in manoeuvres in the autumn, and was therefore still relatively unfamiliar in August 1914; secondly, the railway effort had been geared to achieving a greater concentration to the east and not to the west, and thus the 2nd army, as and when it arrived, would be—according to the ratios planned by Conrad—in the wrong place, on the right wing not the left; and, finally, there remained the danger that the Austrian thrust would be a blow in the air, with the major Russian formations advancing from the east. More positively, the new orientation brought the Austrians closer to the Germans. Implicit here, however, was the contradictory nature of the expected shape of allied co-operation—on the one hand an increasing Austrian reliance on the idea of a German supporting thrust across the Narew, and on the other, a blunted Austrian attack in Galicia, making even more remote the likelihood of prompt German aid.23

  Conrad was, to a considerable extent, in the hands of his railway department. Railway construction in the empire had reflected economic considerations rather than strategic. The track into Bosnia-Herzogovina was no more than a branch line, and yet the annexed provinces constituted the principal deployment area against Serbia’s flank. Beck’s efforts in the Carpathians in the 1880s had considerably accelerated deployment in Galicia, raising the maximum number of trains per day from thirty-three to 132. But by 1914 the Russian effort could outstrip the Austrian. Russia could direct 260 trains a day against Austria-Hungary, whereas the Austrians could only manage 153 in reply: it would take Russia twenty days but Austria thirty to run 4,000 trains to Galicia. Although the decision to pull the Austrian deployment back helped mitigate this inferiority, it also required stations that had not been prepared for the task to cope with massive troop movements.

  The Bosnian crisis had revealed the difficulty of redeploying troops from Serbia to Galicia, not least because four lines ran to Serbia while seven ran to Galicia. Local railway interests frustrated any effort to improve the links between the two fronts, neither Austria nor Hungary being prepared to accept responsibility for the cost of new track. In 1912–13 both the operations and the railway departments assured Conrad that a decision to mobilize against Serbia could be replaced by a full mobilization against Russia without disturbance to the overall deployment scheme. The significant expectation in this note of comparative optimism was that one option would replace another; no consideration was given to the two operating in tandem. What followed was the decision—in itself a reflection of railway capacity—to mobilize and concentrate the 2nd army separately.24

  In most other respects the Austro-Hungarian railway timetable was based on realism to the point of pessimism. Straub, the head of the railway department, preferred to think in terms of the worst possible performance by goods trucks, when his staff—perhaps equally unrealistically—urged him to calculate on the basis of fast passenger trains.25 Thus, Austro-Hungarian train speeds were calculated at 11 kilometres per hour on single-tracked lines, and 18 on double-tracked, compared with German estimates of 30 kilometres per hour. Halts to water and coal were allowed for at the rate of six hours in every twenty-four. And the capacity of the trains themselves was deliberately constrained, with a standard military train being fixed to conform to the size of an infantry battalion (fifty carriages), rather than scaled up to its maximum peacetime size of twice that. Even locomotives made available by the rearward deployment in Galicia were not re-employed in Straub’s scenarios. In the event, therefore, mobilization and concentration against Russia were achieved ahead of the Austrians’ unnecessarily pessimistic schedule.26

  In July 1914 the two Central Powers were still remarkably ignorant of each other’s plans. Each had formed a mental picture of the other which conformed to its own wishes rather than to the other’s intentions. ‘It is high time’, the German military attaché in Vienna wrote to Moltke’s deputy on 1 August 1914, ‘that the two general staffs consult now with absolute frankness with respect to mobilization, jump-off times, areas of assembly, and precise troop strength.’27 It was too late. On 25 July Conrad had taken the decision to mobilize against Serbia alone. Not until 30 July was there any direct communication between the two chiefs of staff, when Moltke, thoroughly alarmed by the fact that the Austro-Hungarian army was still ponderously preparing for a Balkan coup and not for the European war which was now imminent, pressed for mobilization against Russia. On 1 August Conrad finally absorbed the German message: a German attack in East Prussia was most unlikely, there would be no offensive in Poland, and thus Austria-Hungary was the mainstay of the Triple Alliance in the east.

  Conrad’s decision to mobilize against Serbia alone had been made before Russia’s position was clear. But a quick victory over Serbia, not a European war on unequal terms with Russia, was both what he wanted and what his army was capable of. Moreover, there seemed a chance that speedy success on the battlefield might determine the political situation. The point at issue was Austria-Hungary’s status as a Balkan power, not as a great power. The defeat of Serbia could secure relations with Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, and Turkey. A defensive campaign against Serbia, although an easy military task, was therefore not an option in political terms. Indeed, Berchtold, reflecting the diplomatic priorities, wanted even more troops to be sent to the Balkan front.28

  Redl’s treason made it likely that the Serbs had been apprised by the Russians of Austria-Hungary’s war plans. It prompted the fear that the Serbs would fall back into the interior, so prolonging the campaign. Conrad, therefore, proposed to direct his main forces into Serbia from Bosnia and the west, not from the north, so as to cut the Serbs’ line of retreat. But to do this he needed to pin the Serbs in the north, and for that the 2nd army was vital. Hence the determination that mobilization against Serbia and mobilization against Russia should be separate and distinct steps followed operational logic and manpower availability as well as the railway constraints. On 23 July, the day that the Austrian ultimatum was delivered to Serbia, Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, a divisional staff officer from Lemberg, was encouraged to go on leave, having been assured by a railway dep
artment officer that the implementation of the Balkan mobilization meant that that against Russia could not possibly occur in under three weeks.29

  Mobilization against Serbia was scheduled to take sixteen days, and Conrad needed to know by the fifth day—and therefore still eleven days before actual operations had begun—whether to redeploy the 2nd army against Russia. In practice, however, the delays in the implementation of mobilization against Serbia meant that the military options did not close as rapidly as Conrad had hoped. The railway department deemed that little could be done on the first day—26 July—as it was a Sunday and the post offices would be closed. The first day of mobilization proper, 27 July, was planned as a free day to enable those called up to put their domestic affairs in order. On 28 July, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Conrad reckoned that the option of mobilization against Russia would be open until 1 August. Both Russia’s decision for general mobilization and Moltke’s pressure on Conrad to concentrate against the threat to his north were abundantly clear before that deadline. But Conrad defied his own schedule. On 1 August he explained his position to Moltke: ‘We could, and must, hold fast to the offensive against Serbia, the more so since we had to bear in mind that Russia might merely intend to restrain us from action by a threat, without proceeding to war against us.’30