To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Schlieffen had built his short-war illusion on the financial impossibility of sustaining a long war. This was the explanation for the probability of a war of limited duration most commonly embraced by soldiers in all the belligerent nations. It coloured the views of the Prussian War Ministry.78 It persuaded Sir Archibald Murray, the British chief of the imperial general staff in August 1914, that the war could only last for eight months. And those who disagreed, like Murray’s superior Lord Kitchener, did so by taking issue with the financial argument: Kitchener pointed out, somewhat naively and certainly irrelevantly, given the preparations for a great continental war over which he was presiding, that colonial wars had been fought on a ‘financial shoestring.79 Neither side tested their assumptions with the same rigour as they put into staff rides or war games. Few had the courage to confess, as did the French intendant general Ducuing, in 1912: ‘Nobody can foresee the length of a future war nor the protraction of which it will be capable. Many think that it will be short because of the enormity of the expenditure before there can be a result. But in reality we do not know anything about it.’80

  The second main foundation of the short-war argument built on by the military was socio-economic. Here too general staffs were happy to draw major conclusions from largely untested hypotheses. The German manual, Grundzüge der höheren Truppenführung, published in 1910, refrained from the explicit statement that the next war would be short, but still stated: ‘The levy of all able-bodied men, the strength of the army, the difficulty of supplying it, the cost of being under arms, the interruption to trade and traffic, commerce and agriculture—for the purpose of having an army ready to fight and easily assembled—all that presses for a quick end to the war.’81 The French equivalent, published in 1913, pointed to similar conclusions.82 Both armies feared that general mobilization would give rise to strikes and demonstrations. They expected domestic disaffection to deepen rather than to dissipate. After all, in the 1880s Engels had anticipated with relish the possibility of a war lasting three to four years precisely because it could create the conditions for the victory of the working class. In 1914 the German Social Democrats appreciated that a long war enhanced the likelihood of fundamental domestic change.83 Thus, in this respect the armies’ search for a short war was driven by resistance to social change, and was at least based on matters closer to their own interests than was any expectation derived from the workings of international credit.

  None of the economic arguments anticipating an early end to the war rested on the possibility that the belligerents would run out of the munitions with which to fight it. After all, Europe underwent an arms race between 1911 and 1914 of sufficient intensity to suggest that both stocks and plant would be available in abundance. Indeed, the state of the arms industry was evidence to support those who expected a long war, not a short one. It was precisely because they could foresee industry’s capacity to continue supplying armies in the field until those armies destroyed each other that so many generals summoned up images of future war that proved to be all-too accurate. The possibility of large-scale industrial mobilization was a key element in the ‘long-war assumption’.

  The mix of these military and economic arguments produced an understandable ambivalence in Germany. Somewhat more surprisingly, it also caused confusion in Britain. As a trading and maritime empire, with a strong money market and a small army, the United Kingdom stood to gain from a long war. Sir Charles Dilke made this very point in 1887.84 Anticipating a long war on 8 September 1914, Lloyd George said, ‘that is where our resources will come in, not merely of men, but of cash. We have won with the silver bullets before.’85

  Britain’s principal weapons, sea-power, and specifically blockade, were also agents appropriate to a war of extended duration. Common to both sides of the debate on British strategy at the Committee of Imperial Defence on 23 August 1911 was the presumption that the war should be made to be long. Henry Wilson wanted to commit the British Expeditionary Force to the continent so as to forestall any danger of a quick German victory: Britain’s staying-power was to be pitted against the German army’s initial impact. On this occasion Churchill said that British influence on the war would be greatest after twelve months.86 But on the war’s outbreak he told the Admiralty departments to proceed on the assumption that the war would only last twelve months, and that the greatest effort would be required in the first six.87 The Admiralty, while expediting the completion of ships under construction, cancelled all other contracts.88 Logistically, it was completely unprepared for a long war. The building of the fleet had been achieved at the expense of the dockyards and shore bases needed to sustain protracted operations in the North Sea. Fuel stocks were sufficient for four-and-a-half months.89 Not until October 1914 did Fisher begin to plan for a long war: on 3 November he drew up a scheme for a fleet of 600 vessels.90

  Part of Britain’s problem was the trade-off between the sort of long-term planning represented in cabinet by Kitchener, Lloyd George, and Maurice Hankey, and the short-term crises generated by the military situation on the continent. Arguably, the pursuit of fleet action early in the war by Jellicoe would have militated against a long war, and would have rendered the short-war idea not illusion but reality. In other words, the conservatism of Britain’s naval leadership helped make the war protracted.91 Converse pressures applied on land. Those at GHQ in France, and especially Henry Wilson, railed against Kitchener’s emphasis on preparing for the long haul at the expense of current needs.92 If these were not met in the short term, there would be no long term.

  Ultimately, British strategic thought lacked consistency for reasons very similar to those found on the continent. Military and naval professionals made assumptions about areas outside their ken, and in their hands commercial and trading vigour became a source not of strategic strength but of vulnerability. In 1901 the head of the strategic section of the Directorate of Mobilization and Intelligence, E. A. Altham, rested his plans for the defence of the empire on the assumption that a trading empire would have to fight a short war.93 On 5 August 1914 Beatty wrote to his wife that the war would be over by winter: his opinion did not rest on the capabilities of his battle cruisers or on the role of sea-power, but on his belief that ‘There is not sufficient money in the world to provide such a gigantic struggle to be continued for any great length of time’.94

  The failure of soldiers and sailors to test their assumption about the workings of economies in wartime was mirrored by the failure of politicians to revise their expectations in the light of military advice. Bethmann Hollweg frequently referred to a war of three or four months. Such hopes, derived from the wars of 1866 and 1870, were not challenged in the light of military developments since then. Instead, they were nurtured by staff officers who rested their hopes on financial guesswork rather than on military probability. The short-war illusion was therefore sustained by the failure to co-ordinate differing perspectives on the next war.

  What does seem unambiguous is the nature of popular belief. The public imagined a short war would be even more brief than that of the most optimistic of policy-makers. Men responded to the call to arms, and their families bade them farewell, precisely because they believed they would be back home before the leaves fell. The only counterbalance to this naivety was the apocalyptic notion of the next war as Armageddon—a vision peculiarly appropriate to 1914 but not exclusive to it. In this context the long-war idea belonged in the imaginings of pessimists, while the short-war illusion reflected most of mankind’s continuing optimism concerning the human condition. Thus, wishful thinking—rather than either military or economic analysis— gave the short-war notion universality.

  When the war was not over within a month, men adjusted by thinking of it as a series of short episodes. The short-war illusion therefore persisted throughout the war. Conceptually, the idea of a long war remained hard to grasp.95 The French victory on the Marne clearly signalled that the fighting would continue for some while yet. But few could conceptualize a war las
ting years. A soldier of the Royal Welch Fusiliers on 5 November 1914 wrote, ‘I am getting awfully bored by the trenches and am feeling fearfully tired. I hope we won’t be in them much longer.’ The combination of his current predicament and his future aspiration produced the calculation that the war would last two to three months more.96 Sandor Ferenczi, serving as an assistant medical officer with a Hungarian reserve cavalry regiment, told his friend Sigmund Freud in January 1915 that the war would be long, which meant an end ‘perhaps in October’—of the same year.97 The tendency, among policy-makers as much as at the front line or on the shop-floor, was to site the conclusion of the war at some point in the middle distance. Few of these predictions were accompanied by realistic explanations as to how the war would be ended, and therefore the time-lapse had to be sufficient for a new element to enter the equation. But it was reckoned that when this new element was felt the end would be rapid. Typically, such events were reckoned to be six months hence. Not until 1917 would it become common to predict the war’s continuation in terms of years. Significantly, when the popular expectation of a short war was finally ousted, crises in morale soon followed.98

  These popular misapprehensions confirm how relative was the notion of what was long or short. For pre-war planners a two-year war was deemed long; for post-war analysts such a conflict would have been deemed short. Even those who before the war reckoned on a short war had no common scale to define what they meant. In Germany most predictions oscillated between four and nine months, but some ran up to a year.99 In Britain in 1912 the general staff said that a war would last longer than six months, but wisely refused to give an upper limit.100 Furthermore, views changed as the war progressed. Kitchener’s belief in a long war, shaped at least in part by the experience of colonial operations, wobbled in the face of the intensity of European warfare and its attendant shell shortage.101

  Predictions of a short war or long war were therefore themselves a cloak for imprecision. Variations of two to three months, given the scale of national mobilization envisaged, were fraught with significance for the consumption of resources and the pace of industrial mobilization. From this point of view the debate was of value only in the most general sense. Neither set of predictions was translated into policy before the war, or even into plans for implementation on mobilization, in any of the belligerent powers. In this most reductionist sense too, the problems of industrial mobilization were not contingent on any pre-war expectations concerning the war’s length.

  RAW MATERIALS, MUNITIONS PRODUCTION, AND THE CENTRAL POWERS, 1914–1916

  On 8 August 1914 Walther Rathenau, of the German electrics giant AEG, called on Colonel Heinrich Scheuch, head of the Allgemeine Kriegsdepartement of the Prussian War Ministry. Scheuch was responsible for all orders for munitions. The immediate object of Rathenau’s visit was to discuss the exploitation of Belgian industry. Rathenau seems to have envisaged a quick campaign, but a long war. He appreciated that Britain’s entry would prevent a rapid victory in the west having decisive effects. But the territorial gains could provide the wherewithal to enable Germany to sustain protracted operations. Scheüch was of a like mind. He reported the exchange of views to his minister, Falkenhayn. Falkenhayn then invited Rathenau to meet him on the following day.

  By the time Rathenau saw Falkenhayn on 9 August he had digested a memorandum written on the 8th by his AEG colleague Wichard von Moellendorff. Moellendorff was worried by the implications of a British blockade for German imports of raw materials. His immediate concerns were those of the AEG, and in particular its reliance on imported copper. But he nurtured a longer-term objective. He envisaged the creation, through the central allocation of raw materials, of a ‘deutscher Gemeinwirtschaft’—a state-led centralized economy. Thus, onto his original preoccupation with Belgian booty Rathenau now grafted a scheme for the central appropriation, allocation, and distribution of raw materials in order to benefit war industries. Rathenau prepared a memorandum for Falkenhayn along these lines. The Prussian war minister was convinced. He asked Rathenau to head a new office, the Kriegsrohstoffsamt (KRA or war raw materials office). To give the KRA some military clout, a passed-over colonel, Boehme, was hauled out of the clothing office of II corps to be Rathenau’s nominal collaborator. On 13 August 1914 the KRA began business.

  The story of the establishment of the KRA is bewitching in its suddenness and in its completeness. Particularly compelling is the ease with which a Jewish businessman stormed the ramparts of the apparently conservative and anti-Semitic Prussian army. Far from being doubly disqualified, Rathenau—at least on his own account—found himself being pressed into service. And it is that version of the story, framed in December 1915, which has generated the principal controversy surrounding the episode.102

  Rathenau’s account failed to give credit to his subordinate, Moellendorff. The hinge of their argument—whether or not Rathenau was already convinced of the need for the central control of raw materials before he read Moellendorff’s memorandum—puts the emphasis on the precise sequence of events on 8 and 9 August. Thus, the effect of the debate was to heighten the stress on the short-term and the immediate. The decisiveness and urgency of both entrepreneurs was contrasted with the previous procrastination and inaction of the German government. The consensus that Germany had made no pre-war preparations for economic mobilization became the essential foil to the events of early August. Scheuch and Falkenhayn were only accorded walk-on parts.103

  But a reconsideration is required. First there is Scheüch. His response is evidence that the need to prepare for a long war had penetrated the bowels of the War Ministry. Secondly, there is the picture of Falkenhayn created by Rathenau’s version of events. Clear-headed, masterful, and decisive, his focus was on the long term, uncluttered by the immediate trivia of mobilization. Whether Moellendorff or Rathenau should get the credit is largely beside the point: both were preaching to the converted.

  Schlieffen’s replacement by Moltke had given the prophets of a long war an audience. Hitherto Schlieffen’s need for a quick victory had brooked no argument; thereafter, there was at least debate. From 1906 the Prussian War Ministry, previously sidelined by the dominance of the chief of the general staff, took a larger share in the formulation of policy. The military authorities conferred with the civilian concerning the economic preparations for war. An intellectual conversion began.

  That ideas did not become policy was largely attributable to institutional impediments. The Reich minister responsible for the economy was the secretary of state for the interior, but so broad was his portfolio that many issues were more pressing than those of contingency planning for war. Furthermore, as Clemens von Delbrück, the minister from 1909, quite reasonably pointed out in his otherwise self-serving memoirs, economic preparation for war frequently conflicts with the needs of an economy in peace: concentration on the former can ultimately undermine the latter.104 With the Interior Ministry inactive, the Ministry of War felt itself powerless. Although a standing committee was established by the two departments in 1906, it contented itself with the calculation that Germany had sufficient stocks of food and raw materials to survive nine months of fighting.

  However, in 1911 the second Moroccan crisis caused the War Ministry’s fears to overcome its sense of restraint. Heeringen proposed a ban on exports to Delbrück. Perturbed by the slowness of the latter’s response, Heeringen then appealed to Bethmann Hollweg. The Balkan war reinforced Heeringen’s concerns. It may also have played its part in converting Delbrück, for in 1912 he expressed his agreement with Emil Ludwig Possehl, who used the forum of the Army League to advocate a department of wartime economic planning.105 In November Delbrück—probably under instructions from Bethmann Hollweg (although Delbrück denied this)—convened a conference of interested parties to discuss economic mobilization. Constituting itself as a standing commission, much of its work in 1913 was undertaken by subcommittees devoted to the collection of information. A plenary meeting in May 1914 was the first opportun
ity to formulate policy. By now, however, Delbrück was the activist and Bethmann Hollweg his opponent. The chancellor was fearful that overt economic preparation for hostilities would further destabilize an already fraught international situation. When war broke out it seemed that in absolute terms Delbrück had failed: Germany had recognized the possibility of a long war, conceivably on a global scale, but it had taken no significant steps to prepare for it.106

  This stress on outcomes and its accompanying denigration of deliberation serve to heighten the importance of Rathenau’s intervention in August 1914. Nor does this interpretation seem to be undermined by a closer examination of the contents of the pre-war discussions. Their focus was less on the raw-material needs of the war industries than on the maintenance of food supplies. The initial involvement of the general staff in the issue of economic mobilization was motivated by the need to feed the army. Of related concern were the problem of liquidity (as cash was needed to buy food, fodder, and horses), and the interruption to civilian transport (particularly that carrying foodstuffs to major cities) through the army’s commandeering of the railways. Therefore mobilization, and its implications for Germany as a whole, was the point at which the general staff’s concern with war touched the army’s more general preoccupation with internal order. The possibility of domestic opposition to, and disruption of, its plans for war fed on the fear of socialism. Nor was this bogey confined to the army. The threat of revolution was a more continuous pressure on the Ministry of the Interior than the contingency of war. Both departments linked economic questions to social ones, and for both this convergence resulted in a preoccupation with food stocks.