Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914. Max Hastings
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the 1912 War Council’s significance, rejecting the darkest ‘Fischer’ thesis that Germany thereafter directed policy towards precipitating a general European conflict, the record of subsequent German conduct shows Berlin strikingly untroubled by the prospect of such an outcome. The nation’s leaders were confident they could prevail, so long as a clash came before Russian rearmament was completed in 1916. Müller felt obliged to inform the Kaiser that some senior officers were so convinced war was imminent that they had transferred their personal holdings of cash and shares into gold.
Bethmann at times thereafter seemed to waver. For instance, he said in June 1913: ‘I have had enough of war and bellicose talk and of eternal armaments. It is high time that the great nations settle down and pursue peaceful work. Otherwise it will certainly come to an explosion, which no one wants and which will hurt everyone.’ Yet the chancellor played a prominent role in strengthening Germany’s war machine. In conversation with Field-Marshal Wilhelm von der Goltz, he told the old soldier and military intellectual that he could secure the Reichstag’s support for any amount of military funding. Goltz responded that in that case the army had better hurry to present its shopping list. Yes, said the chancellor, but if you ask for a lot of money you will need to be seen to use it soon – to strike. Goltz warmly agreed. Then Bethmann added, in a characteristic moment of hesitation: ‘But even Bismarck avoided a preventive war in the year [18]75.’ He was very conscious that the Iron Chancellor, towards the end of his life, had urged that Germany should stop fighting. Goltz said scornfully that it was easy for Bismarck to take that line, after winning three earlier wars. Bethmann became a prime mover in pushing through parliament the huge 1913 Army Bill, which dramatically increased the nation’s military strength.
Meanwhile, Moltke was only the foremost of Germany’s leading soldiers who, during the nineteen months between the December 1912 War Council and the August 1914 outbreak of war, displayed a keen appetite for a European showdown. In May of the latter year, army quartermaster-general Gen. Count Georg von Waldersee wrote a memorandum which expressed optimism about Germany’s immediate strategic prospects, coupled to gloom about the longer term: ‘Germany has no reason to expect to be attacked in the near future, but … it not only has no reason whatever to avoid a conflict, but also, more than that, the chances of achieving a speedy victory in a major European war are today still very favourable for Germany and for the Triple Alliance as well. Soon, however, this will no longer be the case.’ There is vastly more documentary evidence to support the case that German leaders were willing for war in 1914 than exists to sustain any of the alternative scenarios proposed in recent years.
The Triple Entente had in common with the Triple Alliance the fact that only two of its parties were firmly committed to fight together. It represented an expression of goodwill and possible – but by no means assured – military collaboration: something more than that between France and Russia, something less on the part of Britain. The Russians always knew that they must fight any war from the exposed salient of Poland, vulnerable in the north and west to Germany, in the south to the Hapsburg Empire. The race to deploy forces following mobilisation was in the Russians’ eyes a race to save Poland; their first priority was to secure its borders.
Back in 1900 they had made a decision to launch simultaneous offensives against the Germans in East Prussia, against the Austrians in Galicia. Though they wavered about this in 1905, by 1912 they had renewed the commitment, and sustained it thereafter: they were much attracted to the notion of conquering Hapsburg Galicia, and thus acquiring a strong new mountain frontier on the Carpathians. They had two alternative schemes. The first, ‘Plan G’, covered the unlikely contingency that Germany deployed the bulk of its army in the East. The second, implemented in 1914, was ‘Plan A’. This required two armies to drive into East Prussia as a preliminary to an invasion of Germany proper. Meanwhile a further three armies were to launch the main thrust against the Austrians, driving them back to the Carpathians.
France proposed to implement against Germany its ‘Plan XVII’. This had been refined by Joffre, but was far less detailed than Moltke’s arrangements. Where Schlieffen sketched a design for a grand invasion of France, the French General Staff merely schemed operations against the German army, though these assumed a subsequent advance into the Kaiser’s realm. Plan XVII principally addressed the logistics for concentrating forces behind the frontier, and contained no timetable for operations, nor commitment to explicit territorial objectives. Much more important than the plan were the ethos and doctrine promoted with messianic fervour by the chief of staff. ‘The French Army,’ declared its 1913 Regulations, the work of Joffre, ‘returning to its traditions, henceforth knows no law but the offensive.’ Berlin’s best source in Paris, ‘Agent 17’, an Austrian boulevardier named Baron Schluga von Tastenfeld who acquired much of his information by mingling at the grand salons, informed Moltke – correctly – that Joffre was likely to make his main effort in the Ardennes, at the centre of the front.
France’s chief of staff was a technician, not an intellectual. Always a grave figure, he had acquired in childhood the nickname ‘le père Joffre’ – ‘Papa Joffre’. German intelligence characterised him as hard-working and responsible, but judged him too slow and heavy to respond effectively to such a spectacular initiative as the Schlieffen envelopment. French politicians, however, approved of Joffre because – unlike many of his peers – he was devoid of personal political ambitions. They also found him refreshingly direct. Legend held that Joseph Caillaux, France’s leader during the Agadir crisis, asked the chief of staff, then newly appointed: ‘General, they say Napoleon waged war only if he thought he had a 70–30 chance of winning. Have we a 70–30 chance?’ Joffre answered tersely: ‘Non, monsieur le premier ministre.’
Whether or not the chief of staff indeed took such a cautious view in 1911, he had since become more confident. Joffre believed that, in partnership with the Russians, the French army now possessed the strength, and above all the spirit, to vanquish the Germans. He made a misjudgement common to all Europe’s soldiers in 1914, based upon an exaggerated belief in the power of human courage. The French called it ‘cran’ – guts – and ‘élan vital’. Training emphasised the overriding importance of the will to win. The French army equipped itself with large numbers of its superb soixante-quinze – a 75mm quick-firing field gun – but neglected howitzers and heavy artillery, which it considered irrelevant to its offensive doctrine. Events would demonstrate that 75s and cran did not constitute an effective system for making war, but in the summer of 1914 Joffre and most of his colleagues supposed that they did.
As for French appraisals of German intentions, the intelligence officers of the Deuxième Bureau importantly underestimated the overall strength of the German army, because they did not anticipate that Moltke would deploy his reserve formations alongside his regular ones; they also thought he would send twenty-two divisions to face the Russians, whereas in reality he committed only eleven. They correctly predicted that the Germans would attempt an envelopment, but because of their misjudgement of enemy strength, they greatly mistook its geographical scope. They supposed that the Germans would come through only a corner of Belgium, instead of sweeping across the entire country. Joffre calculated that German concentrations in the north and south must make Moltke’s centre weak, and vulnerable to a French thrust. In this he was quite mistaken.
Both sides’ commanders grossly underrated their opponents. Elaborate rival plans for mobilisation and deployment were not the cause of conflict in 1914, but the Great Powers might have been much less willing for war had their soldiers recognised the fundamental weakness of their offensive doctrine. All the nations’ assessments were critically influenced by Japanese successes in attack in 1905, against Russian machine-guns. They concluded that this experience demonstrated that if the spirit was sufficiently exalted, it could prevail against modern technology.
Enthusiastic British patriots, in the early summer of 1914, were looking forward to a commemoration the following June of the centenary of the Battle of Waterloo: they proposed to make the occasion a celebration of the fact that for a hundred years no British army had shed blood in western Europe. Nonetheless, cautious contingency plans were in place to do so again. The British and French armies had begun staff talks in 1906, and Britain signed an agreement with Russia the following year. The Russians, however, saw reason to question their new friend’s